HERE WE GO AGAIN. The Associated Press reports polling that puts a hypothetical Kerry/McCain ticket with a double-digit lead over the Bush/Cheney one.

53 percent to 39 percent? Those numbers are pretty impressive. Still not gonna happen, though.

--Nick Confessore

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE. Commentary on George W. Bush's Iraq speech, why economics should be considered a "values" issue, and American Idol. Yeah, that's right: American Idol. What, you thought we watched nothing but NewsHour?

CONSISTENT ENOUGH. Via Mickey Kaus (who else?) comes another example of John Kerry's rumored flip-floppery:

[Sandy] Berger said, "John Kerry has been amazingly consistent from the beginning on Iraq and he has been consistently right on the need for troops" and other issues.

But in the past eight months, Kerry has reversed his position on sending more American troops to Iraq.

In an April 30 Fulton, Mo., speech Kerry said that if U.S. commanders in Iraq need more troops then "they should get them."

Yet last September in a debate with other Democratic contenders in Albuquerque, N.M, Kerry emphatically opposed sending more American troops to Iraq. "We should not send more American troops," he said on Sept 4. "That would be the worst thing. We do not want to have more Americanization, we do not want a greater sense of American occupation."

According to Kaus, Berger is "Another Kerry Surrogate Embarrassed" by his candidate's bad behavior. And it's certainly the case that Tom Curry wrote this article up in a way designed to embarras Berger. But is it fair? No. To see what's going on here you need to look back at the state of the debate in early fall 2003. It was clear by then that the mission in Iraq needed more troops, and especially needed more troops in certain vital areas like military police and civil affairs. Back then, it also looked like it would be possible to secure significant contributions of foreign troops to the operation if the United States was willing to cede control of the political process to the United Nations.

One school of thought, associated with John McCain and Bill Kristol, was that this was a bad deal and we ought to send more American troops and keep control for ourselves. Another school of thought, to which Kerry adhered, was that ceding control was the right way to go. On the one hand, it would get us more troops, and on the other hand it would increase the mission's political legitimacy. Kerry, in other words, has been "consistently right on the need for troops" in Iraq which, if you look at it, is exactly what Berger said. So why the switch from more foreign troops to more American troops?

Well, there was a third school of thought represented by George W. Bush, who exercized his patented strong leadership in times of change by refusing to acknowledge that the problem existed at all. As a result, the situation continued to deteriorate. Eventually, things got so bad that Bush was forced to cede political control to the UN in exchange for nothing at all. So right now, gaining many more international troops is off the table and so Kerry's no longer counting on that. His positioned changed, in other words, when the circumstances changed. Bush, on the other hand, stuck with his original fantasyland plan until it was far too late, and eventually wound up accepting the worst of both worlds.

--Matthew Yglesias

DISGRUNTLEMENT WATCH, PART SEVENTEEN. Victor Davis Hanson's not disgruntled in print yet, but he will be soon. Check out his call for more brutality in the forthcoming issue of The New Republic:

Practically, a new aggressiveness means greater use of Special Forces, Rangers, elite airborne units, and Marines to spearhead retaliatory raids in conjunction with Iraqi forces. Conventional and purely American units should form strategic reserves out of sight that can arrive in overwhelming force to surround recalcitrant cities should our Iraqi-American forces face problems--and they will, at first. Clear success in Falluja--defined not just by apparent tranquility, but the absence of arms caches, nocturnal assassins, and organized gangs of Baathists using homes and businesses to foment insurrection--will undermine Sadr's militias, embolden democracy-minded moderates, and frighten Iran and Syria into curbing their mischief.

So -- first use more force in Falluja, and when we're done use our added military credibility to crush Sadr. Unfortunately for Hanson, we've just decided to do the opposite:

American forces and guerrillas loyal to the radical cleric Moktada al-Sadr agreed today to pull back from the holy Shiite city of Najaf, in a deal that signaled the end of a seven-week-old stand-off that has left hundreds of Iraqis dead. . . .

The deal, which would leave the Mahdi Army intact, represents another significant compromise agreed to by American leaders to bring an end to the armed revolt that sprang up across much of the country early last month. In the city of Falluja, the scene of heavy fighting last month, the Americans agreed to include anti-American insurgents into a local "security force" as part of an agreement to end the violence there.

The deal in Falluja, which has brought a significant measure of calm to the city, has been sharply criticized by Shiite leaders, who say the Americans made a dangerous miscalculation that will likely explode some time in the future.

The agreements in Falluja and Najaf appear to reflect a strong desire on the part of the Bush administration to bring a measure of at least apparent calm to the country for the June 30 handover.

Time for VDH to get off the bandwagon, I think. Note also the administration's noble goal of "apparent calm." Deferring all the serious problems until the latest possible date is an interesting definition of strong leadership in times of change.

--Matthew Yglesias

SLOGGING TO WHAT? The National Review isn't one bit disgruntled. Hence, their latest editorial:

In a primetime speech, the first of several he is to give weekly, President Bush reiterated his vision for the new Iraq. If the speech didn't contain anything new, except for the symbolic gesture of proposing to destroy Abu Ghraib, it usefully signaled the president's resolve and engagement. Bush did not grovel and apologize for past mistakes, as his critics would like. But he spoke relatively frankly about the difficulties in Iraq and our "failure" -- his word -- to create a credible Iraqi military force. He stood by his essential vision of a free Iraq, but did it in a non-utopian key. He declared his goal "a representative government that protects basic rights," and stipulated that "Iraqis will raise up a government that reflects their own culture and values." Just so. . . .

The political process appears to be roughly on track for the June 30 handover to an interim government. June 30 won't be the magic date when attacks in Iraq cease or when they are perceived to be assaults against the Iraqi people, as the administration has sometimes suggested. But it will be a step forward, and the consultative assembly slated for selection in July in a caucus-like process will be Iraq's first genuinely, if crudely, representative institution in decades. Many hard days are ahead. Bush is now seeking the fourth post-invasion U.N. resolution, but it is unlikely to bring much in the way of international help. Bush has called Iraq a "heavy lift," and Rumsfeld has called it a "hard slog." We have no choice but to keep lifting, keep slogging.

It's a little sad to see a magazine sink to the level of a George W. Bush press conference. No one doubts that pulling out would have all kinds of bad effects and that it would be good to find another option, even if it's somewhat sloggish. But saying we should "keep lifting, keep slogging" simply doesn't tell us anything at all about what we should actually be doing. To say that June 30 won't be a "magic date" has got to rank as one of the great understatements. Right now, we don't even know what's going to happen on June 30 -- who will run the Interim Government? What powers will it have? Surely the answers to these questions make a difference.

There's no point in staying the course if we don't know which course we're on. Since the administration is rather firmly committed to not saying anything clear about this, there's no reason to believe their course to nowhere in particular is worth staying unless you're simply motivated by blind faith in the endless competence and goodness of the Bush team. Call me skeptical.

--Matthew Yglesias

TURNOUT TROUBLES. Ryan Lizza has a fascinating post up on Campaign Journal about the religious dimensons of the 2004 electorate. He's got a preview of some polling data by the University of Akron's John Green, and the numbers don't look good for Bush. The bottom line? For all of Karl Rove's efforts to move more religiously observant but traditionally Democratic voters into the GOP column, "[l]ike a lot of Bush's policies, his religious strategy has helped him with his base but done nothing to attract new voters."

--Nick Confessore

THAT'S HOW IT'S DONE. Kudos to The Boston Globe's Glenn Johnson for going beyond the usual campaign "he said, she said" and giving people some actual information:

"Since 2001, the president has increased funding by more than $13 billion to state and local governments to prepare for terrorism," [Bush-Cheney spokesman Steve] Schmidt said. "John Kerry voted six times against the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. He missed the vote to fund the Department of Homeland Security, which was $29.3 billion, and he wants to replace the Patriot Act, which law enforcement officials almost unanimously agree is a key tool to fighting terrorists.

"His attacks were factually inaccurate and baseless," Schmidt added.

Kerry voted against establishing the Homeland Security Department, whose creation the administration initially opposed, but Kerry did so as a part of the Democrats' efforts to gain labor protections for its new employees.

He voted for final approval of the department, as well as the Patriot Act, but has since said it should be retooled to better preserve civil liberties.

My only quibble is that the Democrats weren't really trying to gain labor protections for DHS employees so much as they were trying to prevent the Bush administration from eliminating protections that they otherwise would have had.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE. Oh, Ahmad. Nobody knows who you're working for -- the Iranians? the Americans? the Iraqis? Whoever it is, there's one man who definitely plans to profit from your exploits: Prospect columnist Charles Pierce. See what he finds trolling through Chalabi's yard sale.

Also on The Daily Prospect:

• The Quiet Candidate: John Kerry is keeping his head down and letting bad news speak for itself. Matthew Yglesias and Paul Waldman debate the merits of the strategy.
• Pomp and Stingy Circumstance: Arnold Schwarzenegger's political skills make for bad public policy on education. By Harold Meyerson.
• Speak, Memorial: Critics say the new World War II memorial is a banal, bombastic "Soviet-style pomposity." The author of Their Last Battle says they just don't get it. An interview with Nicolaus Mills. By Rob Anderson.

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES. I was going to link to yesterday's defense of Ahmed Chalabi by The Wall Street Journal editorial board as an example of disgruntlement, but I realized last night that it says something more interesting. The bulk of the defense is based on a "classified report" that someone "made available" to the Journal. That indicates, or so it seems to me, that contrary to some reports Chalabi hasn't been abandoned by his friends in the Pentagon, they've just lost out in the interagency power struggle here in DC.

Laura Rozen thinks Chalabi has been abandonned. She has another theory, namely that the Journal got the report from the INC, not from the Pentagon. That could be true, and it raises the interesting question of who gave the classified report to the INC? Certainly someone in the Pentagon is leaking information to the Journal, since today's editorial about al-Qaeda/Iraq links is again based on government information. This time we're assured that "[t]he chain of control" on the documents in question is "impeccable," so if they're to be believed (which perhaps they aren't) this doesn't come through some INC guy on the outside.

The end of the article mentions that Stephen Hayes is writing a book on the subject. Months ago Doug Feith's office took a dossier full of already-discredited "evidence" of such links and leaked it to... Stephen Hayes, who wrote it up breathlessly for The Weekly Standard. It's suggestive, I think.

--Matthew Yglesias

NOT NECESSARILY THE NEWS. Sometimes, you have to wonder whether columnists write things they know cannot be true just to have something to write about. In this David Broder wanna-be column bemoaning the polarization of Washington, the Dallas Morning News' Carl P. Leubsdorf writes:

[John] Kerry probably doesn't really think [John] McCain will abandon the GOP despite his barely concealed disdain for President Bush. Besides, as admirable as the Arizona senator is as a person and public official, he lacks the personality and temperament to be No. 2.

But floating his name and those of other Republicans like Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska signals that the Democratic candidate understands that, if he hopes to govern effectively, he will need to overcome the bitter partisanship that has paralyzed Washington in recent years.

Leubsdorf must realize that any Republican who agreed to appear on the Democratic ticket -- especially McCain -- would be excommunicated by his party and would become persona non grata among his former colleagues. The conservative-led GOP majorities on the Hill aren't going to play nice with a Democratic president because he has McCain as his veep. (Although there's a good case to be made that it would help someone like Kerry get elected, as opposed to helping him govern more effectively.) In fact, they might go out of their way to screw that president just to get back at McCain, whom many wingers already loathe despite his pretty conservative voting record, simply because he is critical of his own party.

More Washington make-believe.

--Nick Confessore

HERE COME THE CUTS. The Washington Post's economics reporter, Steven Weisman, has a scoopy piece in today's edition. It turns out that the White House has put government agencies on notice that, should George W. Bush be re-elected, his budget for 2006 will probably include spending cuts for nearly all domestic programs, including those on which he is campaigning this year.

Now, it needs to be said that cuts are probably on the way no matter who is elected. The fiscal situation is that bad. But first, note the casual lying that Weisman uncovers:

Administration officials had dismissed the significance of the proposed cuts when they surfaced in February as part of an internal White House budget office computer printout. At the time, officials said the cuts were based on a formula and did not accurately reflect administration policy. But a May 19 White House budget memorandum obtained by The Washington Post said that agencies should assume the spending levels in that printout when they prepare their fiscal 2006 budgets this summer.

"The cuts were based on a formula"? It's like they assume people are such sheep that they don't even have to come up with sensical explanations any more. Amazing.

The juice in Weisman's piece is, of course, that Bush is planning to cut things, like homeland security and education, that he will be campaigning on this fall. Whoops. Not only is it stupid to cut funding in these areas; it's useless to do so. We are in deficit largely because of Bush's tax cuts. Trimming the fat off discretionary programs is not going to fix that.

Now, there is a lot of waste in government spending. I'm for going after it. Here's a nice report by the Progressive Policy Institute's Paul Weinstein, Jr., detailing a myriad of trims that would cut out ten-year deficit in half. It gores everyone's ox to some extent, and may not be politically palatable for a Democratic nominee. But at the very least, looking through the list gives you a good sense of the different kinds of useless subsidies and overlapping government functions that accrete over the years. Individually, many of them probably made sense at the time. Viewed in the aggregate, some of them are ridiculous.

--Nick Confessore

AS TOM CLANCY GOES... I think Alan Wirzbicki actually understates his case in this article about the new book co-authored by Tom Clancy and Gen. Anthony Zinni. It's bad enough for President Bush that Zinni has turned on him with a bilstering attack on the White House's handling of the Iraq war. But for Clancy to be that unhappy with Bush is practically a zeitgeist shift. This is the best news John Kerry has heard in weeks!

--Nick Confessore

DISGRUNTLEMENT WATCH, PART SIXTEEN. Even with all these chattering-class conservatives losing their gruntles over George W. Bush's ineptitude, there's still a sense that he could turn things around and reassure the conservative elite before the election. What could sink his chances for good, though, is the possibility that congressional Republicans might openly sever their ties with the administration.

This hasn't happened. Yet.

But it doesn't look far off. A number of moderate Republican senators -- and I'm not just thinking of everybody's favorite McMaverick -- are inching closer to full-on condemnation of the president and his advisors. The top candidate for committing party treason on the Senate floor seems to be Chuck Hagel, the Nebraskan who sits on the Foreign Relations and Intelligence Committees. He's been off-message for a while, but the past week has brought some strikingly disapproving comments. In an interview with Prospect columnist Terence Samuel, published in U.S. News & World Report, Hagel said: "We need new ideas, new thinking. That's what I would tell the president: 'Mr. President, you've got to spend some time by yourself... go run or look out a window.' "

Now, it should be noted that Hagel also said he would support Bush's re-election, but he has to know that this sounds like a call for Bush to follow in the great Texan tradition of declining to run for a second term. He's also repeatedly criticized key Bush advisors, though rarely by name; Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle are all named in the U.S. News article. Speaking on CNN Late Edition, Hagel said that Bush "essentially hold[s] himself hostage to two or three key advisers," and expressed support for more Democratic involvement:

[T]hey don't reach out to Democrats, which I think is astounding. And, again, at a time the president and his team need a lot of clear-headed advice, experienced advice, it seems to me for the good of the country and to develop some precision and quality in our policy that you would want other points of view. This administration does not do that.

Now, I know every administration is captive to a president's style, and this happens to be this president's style. I don't think it's healthy for the president, and I would hope that the president would reach out more.

And, by the way, not be flanked by all the senior advisers. Call in three or four senators or congressmen and talk with them on the phone but do it alone. Do it without having somebody standing over him.

This is, of course, a long way from calling for any heads. But if Hagel were to leave the reservation for good, he wouldn't be lonely for long. Rhode Island Sen. Lincoln Chafee, who Samuel quotes as "listen[ing] to [Hagel] differently," unloaded this Pelosian critique in a Monday New York Times article:

"The president talked about being humble when he was running for office," Mr. Chafee said, "but the opposite seems to be true."

The article, in which Elisabeth Bumiller seems to be just begging the Senate moderates to cross the line, also includes more Hagel jabs at the executive branch and some skepticism from Dick Lugar. None of the names are new, but the criticisms are getting more and more pointed. There's been no blood drawn yet, but we'll be watching the Congressional Record closely when they get back from recess next Tuesday.

--Jeffrey Dubner

DISGRUNTLEMENT WATCH, PART FIFTEEN. Boy, oh boy, Jim Hoagland is really disgruntled. Here's a taste, addressed as a letter to Bush in the second person:

Your speech Monday night carried stirring visions of the change you want to bring to Iraq and the Middle East. What it lacked was more important: a clear recognition of the ever-widening gap between those uplifting visions and the explosive conditions produced in Iraq by what has become a self-defeating U.S. occupation policy. Your words lacked the minimal dose of honesty a leader owes his nation in times of crisis.

I write as someone who has supported regime change in Iraq far longer than you or your aides. I have given your policies the benefit of the doubt in some measure because of my long-standing opposition to the genocidal rule of Saddam Hussein and my sympathy for the broader reform goals you enunciate for the region. The lack of realism in Monday's speech and in the draft U.N. Security Council resolution on Iraq that your administration presented a few hours earlier make such agnosticism next to impossible now.

Both documents betray a willingness to see the world as you would like it to be rather than as it is, and a readiness to hope that the gap goes unnoticed or unexamined. With all respect, sir, that is not leadership. Leaders address inconvenient reality and then seek explicit and reasoned support from the nation for dealing with it.

Once it delves into specifics, I think Hoagland's off-base on several points, but as a description of the general problem, this is absolutely right. The only way our problems can be solved is for the president to take steps that make the American people appreciate the gravity of the situation. With that done it would be possible to build public support for the sort of steps that are necessary. But to do that the president would need to admit (implicitly, at least) that things have been mismanaged so far. It's possible that the public would forgive a president who admitted his mistakes, leveled with people, and put forward an ambitious plan to rectify the situation.

Nevertheless, the administration seems to have decided that a more likely path to victory is to try and fool some large minority of people into believing everything's okay, and try to scare the rest into thinking John Kerry's so terrible that you can't vote for him no matter what. As a result, all our policymaking is constrained by the need to maintain the pretense that there are no big problems. But if we can't admit that we have a problem, we're never going to solve anything.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE. George W. Bush has said that the Abu Ghraib abuse "does not represent the America I know." But it does represent problems in planning and training that some military reformers have warned of for years. Jason Vest explains in an article from our June issue.

Also online now:

• Purple People Watch: The latest news from the swing states -- a gubernatorial ploy in West Virginia, geo-pandering in Maine, and more. By the staff of The American Prospect
• The Handler: Our new public-relations advice column. This week: how the Bushies should have handled Abu Ghraib. By Karen Finney
• For America: A review of Anti-Americanism and On Paradise Drive: How we Live Now (and Always Have) in the Future Tense. By Alan Wolfe

NEED THE INFO. Mother Jones' Michael Scherer has a great piece up on the seemingly obscure but actually hugely important issue of public access to government contracting information. The details:

For 25 years, the clearest window into the murky world of federal contracting has been an obscure public database available to anyone for a nominal fee. No longer. Under a new deal approved by the White House, the government's voluminous compilation of contracting information has been turned over to a contractor.

Established by an act of Congress in 1979, the Federal Procurement Data System was a rare island of public information, the only complete record of federal contracts. Using the database, journalists, auditors and federal investigators could review the million or so agreements with corporations Uncle Sam signed each year. They could find the companies reaping the largest awards, track the rise in no-bid deals, and measure the recent drive to replace federal employees with corporate employees. But under a new contract, the General Services Administration has now turned over responsibility for collecting and distributing information on government contracts to a beltway company called Global Computer Enterprises, Inc.

In signing the $24 million deal, the Bush Administration has privatized not only the collection and distribution of the data, but the database itself. For the first time since the system was established, the information will not be available directly to the public or subject to the Freedom of Information Act, according to federal officials. "It's a contractor owned and operated system," explains Nancy Gunsauls, a project manager at GCE. "We have the data."

With the compiled database under private control, journalists, corporate consultants, and even federal agencies will be barred from independently searching copies of it. Instead, GCE has pledged only to produce a set of public reports required by the government, and to provide limited access to the entire database for a yet-to-be-determined fee.

"It seems that something quite inappropriate has been done here," says Angela Styles, who served until last year as President Bush's chief procurement official, noting that Congress requires the government to compile and share this information. "They have ceded their responsibility."

Experts in federal contract law worry that the new system could cripple public scrutiny of federal contracts. "This is the ultimate metaphor for the administration's view of contracting out," says Paul Light, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who has used the procurement database for his own work. "It insulates the process from inspection, which I think is exactly what this administration prefers. They don't want people digging. They don't want people looking." Similarly, Charles Tiefer, a professor at Baltimore Law School who wrote a textbook on contract law, described the change as a political move. "They are covering up," he said. "They are making it more difficult to know that we have less competition."

This is important in principle, since the public should have easy access to information about how tax money is spent. But it's also imortant in practice, because journalists need access to that info so they can keep the public informed.

--Nick Confessore

GOOD NEWS NOT SO GOOD? The other day I conceded that despite some pesky corruption allegations, there really was a lot of good news coming out of Iraq in the telecommunications front. Sure, there are fewer working phone lines than there were before the war, but previously unavailable cell phones are selling like hot cakes, so people are more wired than ever before. Perhaps not, reports Knight-Ridder's Hannah Allam:

Dhia al Aftan has heard his soft-drink factory in southern Iraq runs only once a week. But he's not sure. The phones lines are down as usual and he won't risk being kidnapped to make the trip out of Baghdad.

"Here, take my mobile," Aftan said Sunday, thrusting his tiny Nokia toward a visitor. "Try to call anywhere you want. It won't work."

In a 15-minute tirade, Aftan unloaded a year of frustration over being part of an American-led, $30 billion rebuilding effort that has little to show less than six weeks before the handover of Iraqi sovereignty. Violence and sabotage, he said, plague nearly every sector of reconstruction.

That's an important point -- the Pentagon document I was working off just said how many mobile phones were out there in Iraq, not whether they actually worked. The broader point, of course, is also true, which is why you don't hear much about "good news" from me. Whatever you build -- a new cell tower, a new paint job for a school, a new water pump, etc. -- doesn't wind up doing any good unless you can establish a reasonable security regime.

And we haven't done that. And we're not going to, either, since we're nowhere even close to having the number of troops on the ground we would need to achieve it. Now, anarchy's not going to persist forever, and as the U.S. grows ever more tolerant of non-Sadr militias, they'll presumably fill the security gap -- with potentially dire results down the road.

--Matthew Yglesias

DISGRUNTLEMENT WATCH, PART FOURTEEN. Former CENTCOM Chief and Bush Middle East envoy Anthony Zinni's disgruntlement is of longstanding, but now co-author Tom Clancy is hopping off the bandwagon:

"It troubles me greatly to say that, because I've met President Bush," Clancy said. "He's a good guy. ... I think he's well-grounded, both morally and philosophically. But good men make mistakes." . . .

In discussing the Iraq war, both Clancy and Zinni singled out the Department of Defense for criticism. Clancy recalled a prewar encounter in Washington during which he "almost came to blows" with Richard Perle, a Pentagon adviser at the time and a longtime advocate of the invasion.

"He was saying how (Secretary of State) Colin Powell was being a wuss because he was overly concerned with the lives of the troops," Clancy said. "And I said, 'Look ..., he's supposed to think that way!' And Perle didn't agree with me on that. People like that worry me."

Both Clancy and Zinni praised President Bush but would not commit to voting for him. Clancy said that voting for Sen. John Kerry, the Democrats' presumptive nominee, would be "a stretch for me," but wouldn't say that he was supporting Bush.

That sums up Kerry's dilemma pretty well -- how to gain the support of the legions of disillusioned former Bush supporters. Still, getting the other guy's natural constituents to stay home is half as good as getting them to vote for you, so this kind of sullen attitude may be all Kerry needs. Does anyone care what Clancy thinks? Perhaps not, but he's got a lot of readers, and a whole bunch of hawks seem to think this could be a problem.

--Matthew Yglesias

WHAT "HISPANIC VOTE"? Daily Kos has an interesting post up about the Hispanic vote. It seems that voting experts believe that as many as one million new Hispanic voters will cast ballots in the 2004 elections -- but that Democrats cannot take this vote for granted, because of how volatile the Hispanic electorate has been in recent years. The numbers he posts are indeed fascinating, even shocking, with large double digit swings from year to year. In fact, the swing is so large I'm convinced there's a story behind the numbers.

Here are some thoughts and speculations -- I'd appreciate any feedback Tapped readers might have. First of all, what is the "Hispanic vote"? Is there such a thing in the same sense that there is a "black vote?" We know that voting African-Americans are, for a mixture of reasons, a relatively well-defined group with fairly predictably political behaviors. But as I understand it, the term Hispanic is incredibly broad, and includes a far larger demographic swath on every level. We're talking about recent immigrants from more than a dozen countries along with second- and third- and fourth-generation Americans; people living both in suburbs like Arlington, Va., and city neighborhoods like Washington Heights in Manhattan; people who speak Spanish as a first language and people who speak it only at home; people living in a pretty wide variety of different states. It seems to me an inchoate group for analytical purposes, and perhaps the definitions pollsters are using for "Hispanic vote" is too broad to have any predictive value.

Now, it's true that the "white vote" is also pretty broad and presumably just as inchoate when you parse it out. So maybe that's not the answer. On the other hand, the behavior of white voters is much more consistent than that of our bloc of Hispanic voters. Anyone have any thoughts as to why there's such a wide variation in the political preferences of the "Hispanic vote"?

The floor is open.

--Nick Confessore

PUSHING BACK THE PUSHBACK. As l'affaire Chalabi continues to unfold, one piece of neocon pushback starting to drift around is the notion that folks in the administration were never really all that close to Chalabi to begin with. Laura Rozen's even got anonymous sources pushing this bit of exculpation:

About the perceived discrepancy between the OSD distancing itself from Chalabi versus well known outside-of-government neocons defending Chalabi, this individual says: "I think part of it is simply that a lot of the perception of closeness to Chalabi thing on the part of the administration was a misunderstanding." Paul Wolfowitz, he suggested, was not really close to Chalabi. Chalabi's real constituency was always people outside of government than in, he said.

Insofar as we're talking about warm personal relations -- did Doug Feith invite Chalabi over for dinner in Bethesda, etc. -- this may well be true. When it comes to policy ideas, though, they certainly seem to have been on the same page for quite some time. Way back on December 1, 1997 Wolfowitz teamed up with Zalmay Khalilzad to write an article about Iraq policy for The Weekly Standard called "Overthrow Him," him being Saddam Hussein. Here's the plan:

we need to encourage the revival of the Iraqi opposition. Most Iraqis oppose Saddam's dictatorship. But they feel they were handed the worst possible outcome from the Gulf War -- sanctions and Saddam. Revival of the opposition should not be a matter of organized coup plots, which would be doomed, nor should it consist of CIA manipulation of exile groups. What is needed is the assurance of economic, military, and political support of those Iraqis prepared to take charge of their own future. . . .

As the Iraqi opposition gains ground, we should develop international support for a viable provisional government. This government should control as much of the frozen Iraqi assets as possible, under some international supervision, as long as it represents the entire Iraqi people. . . in cooperation with our friends and regional allies, we should arm and train opposition forces.

This is the Chalabi agenda pure and simple, complete with the gratuitious swipes at the CIA. In September 1998 Wolfowitz offered some congressional testimony on Iraq policy:

A strategy for supporting this enormous latent opposition to Saddam requires political and economic as well as military components. It is eminently possible for a country that possesses the overwhelming power that the United States has in the Gulf. The heart of such action would be to create a liberated zone in Southern Iraq comparable to what the United States and its partners did so successfully in the North in 1991. Establishing a safe protected zone in the South, where opposition to Saddam could rally and organize, would make it possible:

• For a provisional government of free Iraq to organize, begin to gain international recognition and begin to publicize a political program for the future of Iraq;
• For that provisional government to control the largest oil field in Iraq and make available to it, under some kind of appropriate international supervision, enormous financial resources for political, humanitarian and eventually military purposes;
• Provide a safe area to which Iraqi army units could rally in opposition to Saddam, leading to the liberation of more and more of the country and the unraveling of the regime.

Again, this is Chalabi through-and-through. Ten days later Robert Kagan penned an article in the Standard endorsing the Wolfowitz plan. In November of that year the Standard waxed eloquent about the just-passed Iraq Liberation Act which funnelled large sums of taxpayer dollars to Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, specifically citing Wolfowitz's testimony as the genesis of the idea. By January 1999 some people were starting to notice that this exile-based Iraq policy was a bad idea. Mark Lagon of the Kristol-run Project for a New American Century reponded:

That truth has prompted questions about the viability of the Iraqi democratic opposition, which the United States has embarked on supporting with the Iraq Liberation Act. Assisting that opposition is essential to bringing a decent government to Iraq. Recent critiques of this approach (Byman, Pollack, and Rose, "The Rollback Fantasy," Foreign Affairs, Jan./Feb. 1999) have raised questions about such a policy. But if backed by American military power, both from the air and on the ground, support for the Iraqi opposition can work.

Note that this argument -- it'll work if we help them more -- doesn't make much sense if you're contemplating the possibility that your erstwhile democratic opposition is run by a crooked lying Iranian spy. Lest there by any doubt, Wolfowitz wrote a letter to the editor (co-authored with Stephen Solarz) in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs saying the same thing. So were Wolfowitz and Chalabi personally close? I have no idea. Is Wolfowitz a long-time advocate of a Chalabi-centric Iraq policy? He most certainly is.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE. How many Democrats can fit behind one podium? Daniel Forbes reports on what Paul Krugman, Gary Hart, Eliot Spitzer, and a dozen other Democratic superstars had to say at a recent strategy conference hosted by the Nation Institute and the New Democracy Project.

Also online now:

• Un-American Activities: Republicans pouncing on Nancy Pelosi for "endangering" our troops should look in the mirror. By Mary Lynn F. Jones
• He Told You So: Howard Dean was written off last December when he said that Saddam Hussein's capture "has not made America safer." Ahem … By Matthew Yglesias
• A Simple Plan: A Texas congressman you've never heard of does a grand thing. From our June issue. By Matthew Yglesias

STICKING UP FOR CHARLES. I've given Charles Krauthammer a hard time here more than once, so it's worth coming to the defense of his call for higher gas prices against the depredations of Ramesh Ponnuru:

I'm not sure why depressing consumption and maintaining demand for fuel efficiency are supposed to be good things in themselves. Krauthammer refers to "oil blackmail and price vulnerability." On the assumption that he means two different things here, I'm guessing "price vulnerability" is his way of complaining about the damage that higher prices can do to our economy. But how is imposing that damage on ourselves, forever, a solution to that problem? As for the "blackmail" point, it's overrated for a variety of reasons -- but surely Krauthammer realizes that neither taxes nor drilling in America is going to do much to reduce the geopolitical importance of oil to the global market.

Higher gas prices do damage to our economy in two ways. One is the direct damage caused by the high prices, the other is that sudden swings in prices have a destabilizing effect. A permanent policy of high prices obviously wouldn't help on the first score, but it would help on the second. If the price of gas was high and predictable, people would invest in more fuel-efficient cars and would arrange their lives so as to be less car-dependent. As things stand, the market has a limited ability to respond to higher prices, since people typically can't just run out and buy a new, more fuel-efficient car as a response to a temporary swing, and they certainly can't run out and buy a house that's closer to where they work or to a convenient mass transportation outlet.

The other point to be made is that if gasoline prices were made higher by taxes, consumption would go down, and the price of oil would presumably be lower. That means other uses of oil -- jet fuel, electricity generation, etc. -- where it's harder to come up with substitutes would become more affordable, which would have some economic benefits of its own. Last but by no means least, burning gasoline in your car creates a lot of pollution, imposing costs on a diverse array of people besides the consumer, and higher taxes would help reduce that negative externality.

Ramesh is right, though, that higher taxes (even in combination with more drilling) won't do much to change the "dependency" issue on its own. To do that, you would also need to move electricity generation away from reliance on fossile fuels and toward renewable energy and/or nuclear power, so I don't think we could capture the anti-Saudi bonanza Krauthammer's looking for through this method. Now you might think the Saudi-bashers on the right would be more interested in looking into bold initiatives on this front, but that might require admitting that President Bush has exhibited approximately no seriousness whatsoever about tackling the Saudi issue, so I guess I'll have to keep waiting.

--Matthew Yglesias

SEE NO EVIL. Jim Rutenberg's New York Times article on George W. Bush's and John Kerry's respective advertising campaigns is a good example of something that annoys me about campaign journalism these days:

A record year for political advertising has brought with it a hail of televised exaggerations, omissions and mischaracterizations that pollsters say seem to be leaving voters with mistaken impressions of Senator John Kerry and President Bush.

The degree to which the advertisements push the facts, or go beyond them, varies by commercial. While Mr. Bush's campaign has been singled out as going particularly far with some of its claims, Mr. Kerry's campaign has also been criticized as frequently going beyond the bounds of truth.

So which is it? Rutenberg's phrasing implies that Bush's ads are worse, and from what I've seen, that's correct. But I haven't been watching the ads all that closely, and Rutenberg has. Shouldn't it be his job to evaluate the claims made in those ads and tell us which campaign is playing faster and looser with the facts? (Assuming, of course, that the story must include both sides, which it doesn't necessarily.)

UPDATE: Campaign Desk's Zachary Roth has more thoughts here.

--Nick Confessore

"FULL SOVEREIGNTY." Go read through the transcript of last night's presidential address and you'll see that Bush used the phrase "full sovereignty" three times to describe what the interim Iraqi government will have beginning on June 1. Since we used to hear that it would only have "limited sovereignty," that seems like an important shift. As the president put it:

On June 30, the coalition provisional authority will cease to exist and will not be replaced. The occupation will end and Iraqis will govern their own affairs. America's ambassador to Iraq, John Negroponte, will present his credentials to the new president of Iraq. Our embassy in Baghdad will have the same purpose as any other American embassy: to assure good relations with a sovereign nation.

Except that when you think about it, Negroponte's current job -- Ambassador to the United Nations -- is usually considered to be the number three spot in the State Department. So why would you send someone like that to go be ambassador to a rather small, albeit oil-rich, nation if the embassy's really going to "have the same purpose as any other American embassy"?

The answer -- surprise, surprise -- is that the president was, well, lying about this whole "full sovereignty" thing. The details haven't been worked out, but the current US/UK push in the security council is for an arrangement where the Interim Government will have no authority over US troops on its "sovereign" soil, but the American commander will be able to order around Iraqi security forces. There's a rationale for that set-up -- unity of command will enhance battlefield effectiveness -- but it doesn't sound like sovereignty to me. What's more, Paul Bremer's been spending the past several months locking a whole series of policies into place, de facto reducing the Interim Government's authority over domestic policy.

I'm not even sure why the president is dissembling about this; Iraqis aren't going to be fooled, and I don't know that Americans are particularly going to care, but raising Iraqi expectations of sovereign control and then failing to deliver sounds like a recipe for a lot of very disappointed Iraqis, all for the sake of a somewhat tidier speech.

--Matthew Yglesias

A TOUGH SELL. In today's column, Paul Krugman writes:

A recent article in The New York Times, citing concerns of "Republican elected officials, pollsters and strategists," put it this way: "The creation of nearly 900,000 new jobs in the last four months -- a development that might otherwise have redefined the race in Mr. Bush's favor -- has been largely crowded out of the electorate's psyche by images from Iraq."

Funny, isn't it? In 2002, Republican strategists used the impending Iraq war to distract the public from the miserable economic news. Now they're complaining that Iraq is taking voters' focus off the economy.

But as Krugman goes on to point out, the economic news isn't really all that good.

--Nick Confessore

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE. John Kerry has never been one to stand on convention, but does his newest strategy take things too far? Michael Tomasky analyzes the pros and cons of holding a nominating convention without a nomination.

THE GOOD NEWS. Michael Barone recently wrote an absurd book called Hard America, Soft America: Competitition vs. Coddling which is all about how it's good when things are Hard and competitive rather than Soft and nice. It turns out, according to Barone, that everything that works in the world is due to good-old, old-fashioned, tough-minded American Hardness (the inappropriate use of capital letters is in the original) and that insofar as there are problems in the USA, the trouble is our few Soft elements, like teacher's unions and affirmative action. Everything ought to be Hard, though, nice and Hard and competitive. Except, it turns out, media scrutiny of the president's policies where, apparently, an adversarial attitude is inappropriate:

Franklin Roosevelt did that during World War II with his fireside chats. The news was not always welcome: In one early speech, he explained why we would be driven out of the Philippines. And his address to the nation on D-Day was in a form that would arouse shrieking criticism if it came from Bush today: It was a prayer. But for the most part, Roosevelt did not have to deal with one problem Bush faces today. And that is that today's press works to put the worst possible face on the war. . . .

To the criticism that they report and overemphasize bad news, reporters say, correctly, that bad news is news. But in a country like Iraq, ruled by a vicious dictator for the last 35 years, good news is also news. Reporters readily fan out to find bad news. But they seldom seek the good news -- readily available in Iraqi and military weblogs and confirmed in polls of Iraqis -- that incomes, electricity, schools, water quality, medical care, religious freedom and security are improving in Iraq. Some reporters, as the Daily Telegraph's Toby Harnden reports from Iraq, deliberately avoid good news because they think it might help George W. Bush win re-election.

Ah, yes, the good news. I've written previously about the Pentagon's weekly status reports from Iraq and how, in fact, they're filled with bad news. Nevertheless, I can report something good. Back on May 4 I wrote:

But what about the lives of ordinary Iraqis? Well, we learn on page 16 that in south central Iraq the number of active telephone lines is still stuck at April 2003 levels. But wait -- that's the good news. In southern Iraq they're at 98 percent of the April baseline; in the north the figure is 96 percent. Baghdad has actually witnessed a 19 percent decline in landline availability over the past year.

Landlines, of course, are a bit passé. I don't have one myself, at home; I just use a cell phone. How fortunate, then, that the Pentagon official overseeing the construction of the cellular network is now under investigation for corrupt practices in his handling of the contract.

The new May 18 report adds cell phone usage statistics into the mix and now proclaims, "Total number of telephone subscribers in Iraq is now over 1,155,000 (inc. 389,000 cell phone subscribers) -- 38.7% above pre-war levels." Landlines are still below the baseline. So there's your good news -- $200 billion spent, 800 soldiers killed, and we've brought the Iraqi people the miracle of mobile phones.

As for Barone's contention that electricity is improving (important to power your cell phone) the Pentagon says it was worse last week than it was the week before, which was worse than it was the week before that. The good news is that they're up (down?) to about 85 percent of the target... the target they were supposed to have reached last October, that is. We're at around 65 percent of what we're supposed to accomplish by June, and heading in the wrong direction.

At any rate, read the thing yourself and you'll see that there's precious little evidence to support Barone's theory here. Then again, life sure is Hard in Iraq, and where there's Hardness, good things are bound to happen, so maybe things are looking up.

--Matthew Yglesias

ANOTHER REASON FOR CHAOS IN IRAQ. What do you expect when you hire a bunch of 25-year-old political science majors to run the occupation? Here are some depressing highlights from what is, as Kevin Drum notes, actually a very fair-minded story in the Washington Post about the young folks who went to Iraq to work for the Coalition Provisional Authority.

[Simone] Ledeen's journey to Baghdad began two weeks earlier when she received an e-mail out of the blue from the Pentagon's White House liaison office. The Sept. 16 message informed her that the occupation government in Iraq needed employees to prepare for an international conference. "This is an amazing opportunity to move forward on the global war on terror," the e-mail read.

For Ledeen, the offer seemed like fate. One of her family friends had been killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and it had affected her family deeply. Without hesitation, she responded "Sure" to the e-mail and waited -- for an interview, a background check or some other follow-up. Apparently none was necessary. A week later, she got a second e-mail telling her to look for a packet in the mail regarding her move to Baghdad.

Others from across the District responded affirmatively to the same e-mail, for different reasons. Andrew Burns, 23, a Red Cross volunteer who had taught English in rural China, felt going to Iraq would help him pursue a career in humanitarian aid. Todd Baldwin, 28, a legislative aide for Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), thought the opportunity was too good to pass up. John Hanley, 24, a Web site editor, wanted to break into the world of international relations. Anita Greco, 25, a former teacher, and Casey Wasson, 23, a recent college graduate in government, just needed jobs.

For months they wondered what they had in common, how their names had come to the attention of the Pentagon, until one day they figured it out: They had all posted their resumes at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative-leaning think tank.

Right, because the Heritage Foundation is so well-known as a font of nation-building expertise. Where else would you look for volunteers? Then there's this business:

Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Joseph Yoswa said the CPA was satisfied with the quality of applicants. Some staffers may have been young and inexperienced, he said, but "we have people right out of college leading troops on the ground."

Yoswa said the recruiting office had to hire quickly for the Madrid donors conference that fall and "turned to the Heritage Foundation, an educational facility, albeit a conservative one, but primarily a place where you can get good, solid people." He said this was a one-time event and that there was no organized effort to hire Republicans.

Of course, by going to Heritage in the first place, you've got a de facto "organized effort to hire Republicans." And it's amazing to see Yowsa compare young lieutenants out of ROTC programs and the service academies to the demonstrably ill-equipped and unprepared CPA workers. After all, the lieutenants have actually been trained -- highly trained -- for their work. Would that the CPA staffers had spent a couple of months at nation-building boot camp. The Post story goes on:

When Ledeen's group showed up at the palace -- with their North Face camping gear, Abercrombie & Fitch camouflage and digital cameras -- they were quite the spectacle. For some, they represented everything that was right with the CPA: They were young, energetic and idealistic. For others, they represented everything that was wrong with the CPA: They were young, inexperienced, and regarded as ideologues.

Several had impressive paper credentials, but in the wrong fields. Greco was fluent in English, Italian and Spanish; Burns had been a policy analyst focused on family and health care; and Ledeen had co-founded a cooking school. But none had ever worked in the Middle East, none spoke Arabic, and few could tell a balance sheet from an accounts receivable statement.

Other staffers quickly nicknamed the newcomers "The Brat Pack."

"They had come over because of one reason or another, and they were put in positions of authority that they had no clue about," remembered Army Reserve Sgt. Thomas D. Wirges, 38, who had been working on rehabilitating the Baghdad Stock Exchange.

Some also grumbled about the new staffers' political ties. Retired U.S. Army Col. Charles Krohn said many in the CPA regard the occupation "as a political event," always looking for a way to make the president look good.

...

Brad Jackson, a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve who worked with the CPA, said the budget team regularly asked other ministries at the last minute to produce information that would take hundreds of people half a year to gather.

"There were a lot of people who, being political science majors, didn't know what an income statement was, who were asking the impossible. . . . That was giving us ulcers, quite frankly," he said.

The young budget advisers are the first to admit that they weren't the most qualified to be managing Iraq's finances. "We knew we were overwhelmed. We wanted help," Ledeen said. "We were doing maintenance, trying to make sure there were no riots, that no one went hungry." The budget team reported to Rodney Bent, a former U.S. Office of Management and Budget official, and Tony McDonald from the Australian Treasury. McDonald said it angers him to hear people criticize the budget team. "The people who came were young and keen -- not necessarily the most experienced -- but they were here. They did a great job in working as hard as they could."

Although I've heard a lot over the transom similar to Krohn's complaint -- that the CPA was politicized to its core, more concerned with making the White House look good than anything else -- at the end of the day it's hard to come down too hard on the folks in this artice. They went to a dangerous place and worked hard for their country. That many of them had no business being there is really on the hands of those at the top who decided not to plumb the community of professional nation-builders and NGOS, because doing so might be too close to something Bill Clinton had done, and weren't those groups all run by lefties anyway? For shame. And look what the White House's short-sightedness has wrought.

--Nick Confessore

INSIDE THE MACHINE. There's a very good article up on Salon today which, for you non-subscribers, is well worth sitting through an ad for. It describes the growing enmity between former House majority leader Dick Armey, now a lobbyist, and Tom DeLay, his successor as majority leader. In the main the article is about the discontent of ideological conservatives with the DeLay machine, but the passage that caught my eye was one that detailed how the White House works with conservative operative Grover Norquist to police access by K Street lobbyists.

Although he is out of Congress and the GOP leadership, Armey makes his comments at some personal risk; he is now a lobbyist on Washington's fabled K Street, which is ruthlessly patrolled by DeLay and his key ally, Americans for Tax Reform president Grover Norquist. For years, Norquist and DeLay have worked to purge the nation's corporate lobby shops of Democrats, and companies that fill GOP campaign coffers with money are rewarded with access to lawmakers. Enemies don't get their calls returned, and without access, they lose clients. Access is coordinated by the White House, often through the office of another powerful Texan, political strategist Karl Rove.

For two years, the assistant who answered Rove's phone was a woman who had previously worked for lobbyist Jack Abramoff, a close friend of Norquist's and a top DeLay fundraiser. One Republican lobbyist, who asked not to be named because DeLay and Rove have the power to ruin his livelihood, said the way Rove's office worked was this: "Susan took a message for Rove, and then called Grover to ask if she should put the caller through to Rove. If Grover didn't approve, your call didn't go through."

Observers of Washington's lobbying scene who know how DeLay plays the money game wonder if the majority leader had a hand in a recent decision by the state of Texas to cancel a $180,000-a-year contract with Armey's law firm, Piper Rudnick. Texas' stated reason for the pullout was that Piper Rudnick had created a conflict of interest by agreeing also to represent the state of Florida. However, the Florida contract is for lobbying to prevent military base closures; the contract with Texas specifically excluded work on base closings.

Texas is also represented in Washington by the Federalist Group, which employs a former DeLay aide. A spokesman for DeLay said the majority leader had nothing to do with Texas' decision to drop the Piper Rudnick contract. Armey declined to comment on the matter, saying only that DeLay doesn't scare him. "There's only one person in this town who won't take my calls, and I wouldn't call him anyway. You can't hurt a man who don't give a damn."

Very interesting stuff. I knew this existed in general but I think this is the first time anyone's describe how it works.

--Nick Confessore

DOES GAY MARRIAGE HURT STRAIGHT MARRIAGE? Common sense says no, but that hadn't stopped conservative pundit Stanley Kurtz from launching a virtual cottage industry in anti-gay-marriage numbers crunching. Here's a good article in Slate by an actual economist, who crunches Kurtz' crunching and finds it wanting.

--Nick Confessore

CAN YOU VALIDATE MY PRECONCEPTIONS? PLEASE? Get a load of this request from Fox News' Elisa Cho, posted to ProfNet, a site I wasn't familiar with but is apparently a great place for journalists looking for "expert" quotes for their pieces. Pittsburgh Tribune-Review writer Dave Copeland has the deets on his Web site:

TODAY/EDUCATION: LIBERAL BIAS AT COLLEGES - FOX NEWS CHANNEL (US)
I'm looking for academic "experts" who can speak about the "liberal bias" at college campuses and/or the dominance of liberal professors at colleges. I prefer someone who has written a book about this topic. No phone calls, please.
Need leads by 03:00 PM US/Eastern MAY 20
Monitored by eWatch
Elisa Cho elisa.cho@foxnews.com

It looks like the famed National Review reporting method -- the "bleg" -- has spread to other conservative outfits. Copeland promises more examples.

--Nick Confessore

DISGRUNTLEMENT WATCH, PART TWELVE. Bill Safire certainly hasn't lost faith in Ahmed Chalabi, trashing his enemies and dismissing the latest allegations thusly:

Bremer then went all the way. He permitted Iraqi police to break into and trash Chalabi's political headquarters as well as his home, carting off computers and files, our way of thanking him for helping craft Iraqi constitutional protections. Gleeful C.I.A. operatives who accompanied the raid spread rumors that the troublesome Iraqi was a spy for Iran and a blackmailer of recipients of oil largess. True? Who knows? But his shattered picture made the cover of Newsweek, savagely labeled "our con man in Iraq."

Now objectively speaking, the sort of hard-core tilt against Paul Bremer and Robert Blackwill -- the men who are, after all, running our Iraq policy -- constitutes an advanced state of disgruntlement. The dissing of the State Department, too, should constitute disgruntlement, since John Negroponte who'll be taking over there soon, is for all his many flaws Colin Powell's choice for the job. Still, Safire, exhibiting the curious psychological flexibility of the hardcore Bush-fan, manages to maintain a reasonable degree of subjective gruntlement:

Bob Blackwill, a dozen years ago, nicely updated a question conservatives asked about China a half-century before, telling me "There's the 'who lost Russia?' problem." To avert the same question about Iraq in the future, I'll be listening for a strong note of steadfastness in the president's speech tonight.

I'm consistently shocked by the ability of conservative commentators to attribute magical properties to the president's rhetoric. Time and time again, from the diplomatic lead-up to the war right to the present day we've seen the same pattern. A series of screw-ups, combined with rampant infighting within the administration which produces a paralyzing policy drift, starts leading people on the right to get worried. The president then unveils his new plan: Give a speech. During the speech the president emphasizes that Saddam Hussein is a bad man, that Osama bin Laden is a bad man, that the United States is a good country, and that we should be strong and stay the course. Next, conservatives praise the speech to the sky, and all the worries disappear. Then the same thing happens all over again.

It doesn't really matter what the president says, the question is what's he going to do. The current course isn't headed anywhere, and "staying" it isn't going to produce a stable Iraq, much less a happy multi-ethnic pro-American liberal democracy. Right now I don't see anyone -- certainly not Safire -- defending the set of policies that are actually in place. Unless Bush changes some of them, this forthcoming series of speeches couldn't be less relevant.

--Matthew Yglesias

WEEKEND UPDATE. On the lam now that your old friends found out you've been spying for Iran? Here's what you missed:

The Columnists

• Nicholas Kristof. Look how fairminded I am.
• David Brooks. Things are so bad I'm looking for good news in Israel.
• George Will. I'm suspiciously sympathetic to Ralph Nader.
• David Broder. Sure, Bush is terrible, but let's talk about baseball -- partisanship is just so . . . mean.
• Thomas Friedman. If we're lucky, Iraqi Arabs can solve our problems for us.
• Maureen Dowd. Sopranos, Spartacus, and ancient Punjabi wisdom.

The Op-Ed You Actually Need To Read

• Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay on the need for a democratic alliance

--Matthew Yglesias

WHO TURNED ON CHALABI? There are, broadly speaking, two possible scenarios as to what explains the rather sudden new tilt against Ahmed Chalabi. As Kevin Drum's timeline clearly shows, he's long been a controversial figure in government circles, and it could be that his detractors merely gained the upper hand against his supporters in the interagency process. The other possibility is that new evidence caused his supporters inside the administration to change their minds and turn against him.

But which is it? Newsweek likes what's behind door number two:

Chalabi's defenders among the neocons are clearly weakened. Perle, his strongest advocate, had to drop off the Pentagon's Defense Advisory Board because of various business interests. Feith had been under attack; his resignation or firing is routinely (though inaccurately) rumored in the press. Even Wolfowitz, the cockiest of the neocons, did something very unusual last week: he admitted, in congressional testimony, an error (overestimating Iraqi patience with foreign occupation).

Though Bremer was picked for his Baghdad job by Rumsfeld, he has fallen out with the Pentagon and now speaks more regularly to Rice and her staff at the White House. The uniformed military is in almost open revolt against its civilian masters in the offices of Wolfowitz and Feith. The troops resent the Bush administration hard-liners as dangerously ideological.

Same old battle lines, but the anti-Chalabi forces now have the upper hand. The New York Sun, however, disagrees. I'm not a subscriber so I can't read the story, but Laura Rozen quotes the relevant portions:

The charges and the evidence against Mr. Chalabi are so grave, administration officials say, that some of Mr. Chalabi's long-standing allies have begun to distance themselves from him, including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz who once testified before Congress on behalf of the legislation that started the initial public stream of funding for the exiled leader's Iraqi National Congress.

"If the evidence against him were nonsense,Wolfowitz would have said it was nonsense," a Pentagon official told The New York Sun. "This is serious evidence, whether or not it’s proven in the end, it's at least credible enough that we are concerned and angry about it." Another administration official described the evidence as "irrefutable."

There are multiple counterintelligence investigations, including an FBI probe, inside the government in an effort to find the person who passed the sensitive intelligence to the former exiled leader.

That information was so secret, two administration officials said, that the evidence against Mr. Chalabi has only been shared at the most senior levels of the government, and many working level policy-makers have been rebuffed in their requests to see the particulars on the erstwhile American ally.

For this reason, many of his lowerlevel defenders within the administration have cast doubts on what the evidence against Mr. Chalabi means and dismiss the charges against him as either a set-up from the Iranians or a smear job from his foes at the CIA.

The Sun story reads as more authoritative -- containing actual anonymous officials rather than simply repeating DC conventional wisdom about whose stock is down. Still, several things don't make sense to me about this version of events. The main point is that if Chalabi's former backers have really turned against him, then the administration should be (for once) unified on this issue and you'd expect to hear an unusually coherent line coming out of the White House. Instead, you've seen the reverse -- just about nothing in the way of a public explanation of what's going on. Relatedly, the move against Chalabi has been fairly irresolute -- the guy is under suspicion of being an Iranian spy, yet he's still on the IGC, still making appearances on the Sunday shows. Unless some influential figures are pretty sure he isn't an Iranian spy, that's hard to understand.

At the same time, based on what I'm hearing from people the administration isn't simply playing its cards close to the chest -- rank-and-file people on the right are just as confused as I am. Again, if Chalabi's friends have flipped, you would expect a unified message to bubble downwards and outwards from the center, internally if not publicly. Moreover, Chalabi's friends in media and think tank circles certainly don't seem to have turned against him. If their better-connected allies inside the Pentagon have, this is puzzling. The Sun tries to explain this by saying they haven't had access to the evidence themselves. Fair enough, but why can't they seem to convince anyone just on their say-so -- we're talking about a group of people who know each other and have collaborated together on and off for years.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE. You may have noticed a certain optimism infusing the Prospect's columns lately, a sense of unity and a surety that the differences separating moderates and liberals can be overcome. In that spirit comes advice from E.J. Dionne, highlighting 10 fights that Democrats should stop having -- and 10 stands that are worth taking.

Also posted today, only available on The Daily Prospect:

• Ahmad Agonistes: Chalabi's former friends want to put him "back in his cage." By Jason Vest.
• Citizen Rupert: Murdoch is officially moving the News Corp. to the United States. The motive is not exactly patriotism. The first installment of a new TAP online column. By Jarrett Murphy.
• Chicken Littles Recant: Things are looking slightly up for Kerry. Can we just have the election today? By Terence Samuel.
• Brock, Stock, and Barrel: A former right-wing hit man talks about Drudge, Limbaugh, and why he decided to stay in Washington and fight on our side. TAP talks to David Brock. By Tara McKelvey.
• The Mixed-Up Politics of the Deficit: By Robert B. Reich.
• Beyond Abu Ghraib: True, no Saddam. But there are ways in which Iraqis aren't much better off. By Jeffrey Dubner.

THERE'S THE BEEF. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch runs a chagrined editor's note today. It seems that, earlier this week, they ran a column by James K. Glassman -- offered gratis by a publicist for the Web site he hosts, TechCentralStation.com -- attacking Morgan Spurlock's new documentary, Super Size Me. But until the paper's editors heard from readers, writes editorial page chief Eric Mink, they didn't realize that TechCentralStation.com is actually funded in part by McDonald's, though TCS "had failed to note the McDonald's sponsorship when it distributed Glassman's commentary about the movie and McDonald's."

Mink writes, somewhat wistfully:

Glassman's reputation, the timeliness of the film and the controversy surrounding its premise made his opinion piece, offered without charge, an attractive and substantive submission with an arguable point. Readers could read the piece and decide for themselves whether to see the movie, whether Glassman made sense or whether the whole discussion was just silly.

But readers also deserved to know about the connection between McDonald's and the Web site to which Glassman lends his name and reputation, so they could factor that into their thinking as well.

Some additional checking on our part also would have led us to the lavish spinoff Web site that TechCentralStation.com has devoted solely to discrediting "Super Size Me." It also would have revealed information about the company listed as "publisher" of TechCentralStation.com: DCI Group, a high-powered Washington lobbying and public relations firm.

I didn't know TCS had launched a spinoff to cover Super Size Me, but it wouldn't surprise me. I wrote a long piece about Glassman's shenanigans this past winter. (You can read it here.) This McDonald's business is a case study in point. When companies sponsor TCS, they are in essence purchasing an association with Glassman. With his credentials as an American Enterprise Institute fellow and Washington Post columnist, his knack for colorful writing, and his easy access to chat shows and op-ed pages across the country, he is an effective advocate for whatever side he chooses to take. And McDonald's is not the only one of TCS's sponsors whose side Glassman has chosen to take.

When pressed by Mink, Glassman promises he'll "make sure" that any relevant sponsorships are "absolutely clear in the future." I don't believe him. For my article, the Monthly interns and I looked through dozens of Glassman's op-eds on subjects that were of interest to TCS's sponsors, and Glassman almost invariably did not disclose any connection. That, I would argue, is the key to his usefulness -- Glassman's arguments make their way into the debate with his name attached but not the connection to corporations that have an interest in him making those arguments. Editorial pages at small- and medium-size newspapers are especially susceptible, since they have a dearth of big-name contributors and smaller budgets.

Caveat emptor, I say.

--Nick Confessore

THE CHALABI FAN CLUB. With the White House and the CPA turning against Ahmed Chalabi, it's interesting to take a look at which of the folks Reihan Salam terms "the neo-neocons" will stand by their man rather than standing by their president. Laurie Mylroie, via email, seems to be the staunchest of the Chalabites, calling the raid "outrageous, and totally uncalled for." David Frum is still defending Chalabi from his traditional detractors, but is definitely leaving the door open to saying that Bush made the right call.

Michael Rubin, by contrast, thinks this was a big mistake, one of many Paul Bremer has made to "alienate" Iraqis. Bremer has, indeed, made many such moves, but it's hard to construe de-aligning himself from the most distrusted man in Iraq as alienation-inducing. Jim Hoagland, meanwhile, returns from yesterday's moment of lucidity to his traditional rhetorical trick of equating efforts to impose the rule of an exile leader with "democracy."

Jonah Goldberg, wisely, pronounces the whole issue too hard to understand, thus ensuring that whichever faction comes out on top in the end, he'll be okay. Over at The Weekly Standard they don't seem to find any of this worth commenting on.

--Matthew Yglesias

MOYERS' SWAN SONG. Here's a lovely interview with veteran journalist Bill Moyers, who is retiring from PBS this year, published in the Texas Monthly. It's definitely worth reading for Moyers' thoughts on public television, journalistic objectivity, and more.

--Nick Confessore

TAUTOLOGICAL POLLING. The editors of the Wall Street Journal decided to post an online poll asking readers "Which cable news network provides the most accurate depiction of the events in Iraq?" Fox leads, with 61 percent of the vote.

What's funny about this question is that it's asking an impossibility. Almost nobody who watches Fox -- or any other channel -- has any way of independently verifying the accuracy of what's being reported on Iraq. They're all back here in the U.S.! (Or nearly all of them, anyway.) The question might have been better phrased as "which cable network panders most slavishly to your pre-existing views of what's happening in Iraq?" or "which network is telling you want you want to hear?"

A far better way of evaluating the accuracy of news channel reporting is to ask viewers who they get their news from, then test their actual knowledge of the facts. That's what the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes did last fall, as we wrote about here. And it turns out that on questions related to Iraq, those who recieved most of their news from Fox were much more likely to have misperceptions about things like the degree of foreign support for the Iraq war or whether or not we've found WMDs in Iraq.

So much for Fox's accuracy.

--Nick Confessore

THE SLUR AGAINST THE GLOBE. There's this idea out there that The Boston Globe had actually run what were already known to be fake pictures of American soldiers raping and urinating on Iraqi prisoners. Dan Kennedy sets us straight here. What actually happened was that the Globe ran a story about a news conference held by a gullible Boston city councilor and a community activist, who themselves were waving around the pictures and demanding answers. The article itself was, as Kennedy notes, skeptical about the authenticity of the pictures. But the editors mistakenly published a photo of the news conference in which the fake pictures were visible. This was a screw-up, but not the kind of screw-up alleged by the conservative press, including John O'Sullivan (here) and Mark Steyn (here), both of whom either didn't bother to pull up a hard copy of the original story before bashing the Globe, or did and decided to lie about it anyway.

Don't they owe the Globe an apology?

--Nick Confessore

MORE APPLES. In addition to The Washington Post's new photos you might want to check out this nice scoop from NBC News:

With attention focused on the seven soldiers charged with abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison, U.S. military and intelligence officials familiar with the situation tell NBC News the Army's elite Delta Force is now the subject of a Pentagon inspector general investigation into abuse against detainees.

The target is a top-secret site near Baghdad's airport. The battlefield interrogation facility known as the "BIF" is pictured in satellite photos.

According to two top U.S. government sources, it is the scene of the most egregious violations of the Geneva Conventions in all of Iraq's prisons. A place where the normal rules of interrogation don't apply, Delta Force's BIF only holds Iraqi insurgents and suspected terrorists -- but not the most wanted among Saddam's lieutenants pictured on the deck of cards. . . .

The Pentagon's top spokesman in Iraq says the military will not comment on the BIF or what goes on there. He was unwilling to even confirm or deny its existence. Gen. Fast declined our request for an interview due to the ongoing prison abuse investigation, one that has so far yielded charges against only the military’s lowest ranks.

Sounds like a fun, albeit potentially nonexistent, place. When Seymore Hersh began reporting information that plainly contradicted the "bad apples" theory of the case, the main tactic I saw on display from the right was to attack Hersh's credibility. Today's National Review Online gives us a good example of the genre from Barbara Comstock, which includes such rhetorical tactics as asking us to believe that conservatives think John F. Kennedy was a squeaky-clean guy and Marty Peretz is a liberal.

At this point, though, reports to this effect have surfaced in so many outlets besides The New Yorker that Hersh's credibility isn't what's at issue here, unless every other magazine and newspaper in the country is also staffed entirely by writers who just make things up. Time for another theory.

--Matthew Yglesias

AND WHO TOLD CHALABI? No one quite seems to know at this point exactly which of the many reasons to turn against Ahmed Chalabi proved dispositive, but probably the most serious thing he's been charged with is passing U.S. intelligence information on to his friends in Tehran. Laura Rozen rounds up the press clippings on the subject, noting that reports of FBI involvement in the raid suggest a counterintelligence element to the turn on Chalabi, and asks the next obvious question: If Chalabi passed information to Iran, who passed it to Chalabi?

The important thing to note here is that Chalabi's attorney says FBI agents were involved in the Baghdad raid. It bolsters evidence I have been hearing from my sources that there is a high level FBI-led counterintelligence investigation into who leaked highly classified US intelligence to Chalabi, that he and his intelligence chief passed to the Iranians. . . .

Who with access to highly classified US intelligence gave Chalabi such information in the first place? I am told the stakes are very high, and this is the big deal here. That is the investigation that has people worried on this side of the pond. I am told that those automatically assumed to have such access may not have.

Should be an interesting investigation -- if elements of the U.S. government are busy preparing to arrest one another, that would go a long way toward explaining the seeming confusion regarding what to say about this in the White House communications operation.

--Matthew Yglesias

BEING AMERICA. There was a fair bit of chatter about John Kerry's new message "Let America be America Again" in the halls at the New Democratic Network conference today (which also featured, in what has to be a Washington first and a testament to the new spirit of Democratic unity sweeping through D.C., presentations by both Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and David Brock). A lot of questions about the phrase were raised -- mainly of the "huh?" variety -- and it's become the subject of some entertaining discussions online, as well.

I happen to rather like the formulation, myself. It appeals to the sense that this country has gotten off course / is on the wrong track, and highlights what strikes me as the basic Kerry argument -- which, granted, I've never heard him articulate in so many words -- that there was a point in American history just a few short years ago when we felt proud of ourselves, were internationally respected, had a booming economy, and had a budget surplus. A lot of Democratic politicians worked along with Republicans in a bipartisan fashion to craft consensus legislation that addressed issues they'd been working on for years, and even though the legislation often fell short of Democrats' ultimate desires, they nonetheless thought some of these measures represented steps forward for the shared national project of solving the country's problems. But then something happened. The shared sense of purpose was fractured. The Bush administration and Congressional Republicans veered off in a frightening new direction that cast all Democratic concerns aside and simultaneously failed to live up to its stated commitments, all the while richly rewarding a network of cronies and business allies at the expense of the average American. In short, at the moment at which the difference between the parties looked to be at its smallest, the Republicans used the fact of the centrist consensus to hijack the nation's agenda and take it in a direction even moderate Republicans now find frightening. And then these leaders turned out to simply be no good at governing -- failing to fund the laws they had signed with such fanfare, failing to heed warnings about troop levels in Iraq, failing to listen to the concerns and expertise of the American people and long-time members of the government. And now throughout America there is a growing sense that the government has lost control of the situation in Iraq, that government spending and the deficit have grown to dizzying levels, that we don't know what comes next and that those who hold the reigns of power are being led by a galloping horse. Our stock in the world has sunk, gas prices are soaring, and the news is filled with nothing but pictures of Americans doing things that make the average good-hearted American recoil with shame.

Letting American be America again means getting the country back on track and in sync with the American values that held sway in the public sphere just a few years ago. Kerry's emphasis on the "can-do" American people is good, too, I'd argue, because it's an appeal to American pragmatism, as well as optimism, and we need nothing more at this moment in history than hard-headed pragmatic solutions to some very tough problems.

If you read the Langston Hughes poem this line comes from, you quickly see that this is not a sentiment of simple nostalgia. Take these lines: "O, let America be America again--/ The land that never has been yet-- /And yet must be." In some ways, this is a very Kerry sentiment, in that it's very nuanced and contains several meanings. But in this instance, it is the wonderful complexity of the meanings packed into those short phrases that gives them their power and makes this one of Hughes' great poems. Hughes perfectly unpacks the paradox of the American dream as the ideal that has never been fully realized and yet remains indespensible.

In any event, Kerry's rhetoric will doubtless keep evolving, and there are very good arguments, too, for not taking a complex phrase from a poem as a catch-all campaign slogan. But there's no harm in using it for now, especially when speaking to the base, as Kerry has been. And it strikes me that the phrase has, at its core, the seeds of something that may yet be "it."

UPDATE. I should add that there are several other interpretation of the events of the past few years that are considerably less generous to the Congressional Dems. That said, the more you look into the voting patterns of certain members of the Senate -- and not just Kerry here -- and why they voted for bills they now object to, the more it seems that the central disagreement over certain pieces of legislation isn't about the goals of the laws, but about whether realistic efforts were made to actually accomplish the stated goals (i.e. full funding) or to make sure the laws worked without unanticipated adverse consequences.

This argument from competence seems to be growing in currency. Nancy Pelosi sharply attacked Bush's competence Thursday, saying, among other things: "The emporer has no clothes...The situation in Iraq and the reckless economic policies in the United States speak to one issue for me, and that is the competence of our leader." And Hillary Clinton has been working to invert Bush's argument about "times of change," too, warning in a fundraising appeal for Kerry that Republicans will "create an America we won't recognize" if re-elected. Which is to say, she's creating a Democratic acknowledgement of how unstable our times have been, but then arguing that everything's simply going in the wrong direction because it is being pushed there. Instead of managing the crises of the past few years, she's arguing the Republicans are behind the very instability they cite as an argument for staying in office.

All of which is to say that this seems a significant moment in the evolution of Democratic rhetoric for the general election campaign, with a number of people groping from different directions to find the one clear thing that will explain our times -- and stick as an argument against Bush.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

IT DOES SEEM PRETTY UNLIKELY. Congratulations to The New York Times's Dexter Filkins and Kirk Semple for inching away from "he said, she said" journalism. Reporting on the Chalabi raid, they quote Dan Senior and then assess the accuracy of his claims:

"It was an Iraqi-led investigation, it was an Iraqi-led raid, it was the result of Iraqi arrest warrants," Dan Senor, the chief spokesman for L. Paul Bremer III, the top American administrator in Iraq, said.

Mr. Senor asserted that Mr. Bremer "did not know the operation was occurring today" and was notified only after it had been completed.

Still, with Iraq under the command of American civilian and military authorities in the absence of an Iraqi government, it seemed unlikely that the Iraqi police would have mounted such an operation against Mr. Chalabi, a member of the interim Iraqi Governing Council and until recently a favored ally of the Bush administration, without the knowledge, consent and a significant level of participation by American officials.

Doesn't seem likely to me, either. Now I do think it's rather odd that the CPA and the White House didn't manage to come up with a better cover story than this "no one told us about it" line, but that probably reflects continued interagency divisions within the administration paralyzing the communications operation to some extent.

--Matthew Yglesias

THINKING BIG ON TEACHER QUALITY. In a new column, Matt Miller assesses John Kerry's teacher-quality proposals:

Kerry's new plan offers exactly the right framework. Yet the budget he puts behind it, roughly $3 billion a year, isn't nearly enough to make the difference he seeks.

In a new book I estimate it would cost $30 billion a year (not $3 billion) to raise starting salaries for high-poverty teachers from roughly $40,000 to $60,000 - and to make it possible for the best performers to eventually earn as much as $150,000. This new trajectory would revolutionize the way the career is viewed by college students choosing a career.

Is Kerry's teacher plan better than Bush's? By a long shot.

Does it move the debate in the right direction? You bet.

Is it equal to the scale of our teacher woes? Only if Kerry adds a lot more money later.

I agree 100 percent. But then Miller falls into the classic pundit trap of insisting that his favored policy idea is not only good politics, but in fact politically necessary if Kerry wants to win:

Kerry's emerging budget is far more serious when in comes to expanding health coverage, where he's called for $650 billion over the next decade to address the uninsured (vs. $30 billion over the same period for the teacher challenge). As a result, it's easy to contrast Kerry's plan to cover the bulk of today's 44 million uninsured with the president's plan to reach only 4 million.

As it stands, however, I'm afraid Kerry won't be positioned to offer an inspirational contrast to Bush's record on schools in ways the press can explain and voters can understand.

Offering modest new funding while attacking Bush for not properly funding No Child Left Behind may simply not trump a president (and first lady) who are already blanketing the airwaves with ads touting their passion for education - and who can point to a "landmark" bill passed with overwhelming Democratic support.

That's almost certainly wrong. The most recent poll I've seen has education as the number four priority among voters. About twice as many want to hear about health care, and those two are way behind Iraq which is itself behind "economy/jobs" on the issue rankings. And a Pew poll taken a bit more than a week ago showed Kerry with a fifteen point lead on the (relatively unimportant) education issue. So while I'd like to see Kerry do what Miller suggests (I think education is more important than health care), his campaign is probably on the right track electionwise.

At this point, the only strong issues for Bush are "moral values" and terrorism, so if Kerry is inclined to emphasize his willingness to spend more money than Bush anywhere, it should probably be on the terrorism front. Now, of course, if president Kerry actually wants to do something crazy like actually improve the school system, that would be a good time to revisit Miller's column.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE. Tony Hendra has been having some problems following Kerry's emails. Funny, I don't recall Teresa Heinz Kerry ever referring to a "flipperty-flopperty-boo." (Must not be on enough fundraising lists.)

Also on The Daily Prospect:

• Chalabi Smackdown: So now we're against him all of a sudden? Former CIA Middle East specialist Reuel Marc Gerecht explains why in an interview. By Laura Rozen.
• Death of a Salesman: Why Nick Berg was in Iraq. By Harold Meyerson.
• History 101: Is contemporary liberalism cut off from its rich history? The first installment of a new TAP online column By Mark Schmitt.
• The Secret Lives of Negotiatiors: An Israeli official and a PLO leader share a private mission -- and try to move beyond history. An interview with Yossi Beilin. By Jo-Ann Mort.

LIFE IMITATES THE AMERICAN PROSPECT. About a month ago, Prospect contributor Jim Grossfeld penned a satire about the ongoing reconstruction of Iraq. One of his more amusing tales:

Never one to shy away from new and innovative ideas, Mr. C[halabi] proposed what may have been his most visionary yet: Six Flags Over Babylon (SFOB), the first water theme park in the Middle East!

The Iraqi people, he explained, long for three things: respect from the Arab world, global recognition of their ancient heritage, and recreation. SFOB, he said, speaks to all three.

"The rides will, in themselves, be a tribute to Iraq’s past," said Mr. C, as he showed me an artist's conception of a 700-foot replica of the Ziggurat of Ur that he said would be "the greatest of all roller coasters."

Another drawing showed what he described as a miniature Persian Gulf, where youngsters would carefully maneuver supertanker paddleboats and miniature cargo ships between mines and Spanish patrol boats.

...

After all, we didn't come to Iraq just to rid the world of an evil dictator, but to show this embattled region what a truly free people could achieve.

Now, Jim was just joking. But via Juan Cole, I see that his vision will soon come to pass:

KUT, Iraq - In a Disney-esque approach to guerrilla warfare, U.S. Army commanders here are hiring suspected members of a Shiite Muslim militia to help rebuild a rusted and abandoned amusement park that once drew thousands of families with its Ferris wheel, bumper cars, fountains and picnic areas.

The plan may sound far-fetched. But commanders in the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment say it's based on this simple premise: Enemy fighters don't have time to fire rockets or mortar shells if they're busy earning a living. Rebuilding the amusement park should occupy dozens of men for weeks.

"Call it 'Six Flags Over Al Kut,' " quipped Col. Brad May, the regiment's commander.

...

Renovating the park might, in the eyes of one officer, plant peaceful thoughts in the minds of some militiamen.

Jim was even right about the location, more or less -- "the newly restored swamp area south of Baghdad."

From the article, it sounds like this could prove a fine example of U.S. ground forces stabilizing the local situation with creative public works projects. Who says that liberals don't have a strategy for success in Iraq?

--Jeffrey Dubner

A VAST CONSPIRACY? Bob Dreyfuss thinks (citing Michael Rubin who's moved from the CPA to AEI and has lately been criticizing his former masters) the Chalabi raid is part of a Pentagon plot to restore the INC's credibility by letting him pose as a patriotic opponent of American occupation. I'm not buying it. Paul Wolfowitz's admission that we're not even going to try to disarm the SCIRI and al-Dawa Party militia's indicate that we're accepting that, for better or for worse, the bulk of power in Iraq will be held by indigenous (or, on occassion, Iran-backed) Shi'ite groups.

More fundamentally, if this gang was capable of pulling off this sort of brilliant long-range strategic thinking, we wouldn't be having all these problems. The Bush administration has, from the beginning, been characterized by sharp interagency disputes about all kinds of things, and their Iraq policy has been subject to much drifting around and many about-faces over the years, so there's no reason to think this is anything other than a swing of the pendulum in light of the dwindling credibility of both Chalabi and his would-be puppet-masters in the E-ring.

See more on this from Prospect contributor Laura Rozen (here and here) and Juan Cole (here).

--Matthew Yglesias

SILENCE FROM THE CPA. I'll be very eager to see what the Bush administration has to say about their new Chalabi policy. According to The New York Times, there's nothing yet:

American occupation authorities declined to comment this morning on the raids.

Meanwhile, as Nick Confessore notes, the Chalabi family has its own spin:

"This is politically motivated intimidation," said an aide to Mr. Chalabi as he wandered through the debris-strewn offices of the Iraqi National Congress, Mr. Chalabi's political organization. He blamed L. Paul Bremer III, the top American adminstrator here, for the raids.

This puts the administration in a pretty awkward position. There are plenty of perfectly good reasons to dump Chalabi from his privileged position, namely his long history of providing terrible information to the American government in an effort to manipulate the USA into putting him in charge of Iraq. But this is hardly something Bush is in a position to admit. After all, before the war plenty of people -- take Bob Dreyfuss in the Prospect, for example -- were warning of exactly this. And even more people have been warning since the war of the dangers of this overreliance on Chalabi. To admit that Chalabi-centric policymaking was a mistake would be, in essence, to admit that the whole thing was a mistake from the beginning.

That leaves you with Chalabi's line. Paul Bremer liked him fine as long as he was pliantly in agreement with U.S. policy. As soon as Bremer's priorities and Chalabi's started to diverge, however, Bremer pulled the plug. Says the Times:

In recent weeks, the relationship has further soured as Mr. Chalabi has openly criticized Mr. Bremer and has advocated a more expansive definition of the sovereignty which Iraq will assume on June 30, including full Iraqi control of its armed forces and oil revenues.

So now we have Chalabi posing as the defender of Iraqi sovereignty and national dignity, while Bremer plays the colonialist. It isn't true -- even remotely -- but the only way to rebut the charge is to come clean about Chalabi's sorry record from day one. Is that something the administration can do without seriously damaging its domestic political position? I have serious doubts. Would the administration put its domestic political position over the success of its foreign policy? I think there's no doubt that they would.

--Matthew Yglesias

MEDICON. Here's the final word on those Medicare ads the White House is using federal money to pay for, but which look a lot like campaign ads for George W. Bush:

The General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress, said on Wednesday that the Bush administration had violated federal law by producing and disseminating television news segments that portray the new Medicare law as a boon to the elderly. The agency said the videos were a form of "covert propaganda" because the government was not identified as the source of the materials, broadcast by at least 40 television stations in 33 markets. The agency also expressed some concern about the content of the videos, but based its ruling on the lack of disclosure. The consequences of the ruling were not immediately clear. The accounting office does not have law enforcement powers, but its decisions on federal spending are usually considered authoritative and are taken seriously by officials in the executive branch of the government.

The GAO's finding of wrongdoing is pretty narrow, however, and it's unlikely that anyone will lose a job over this.

--Nick Confessore

THE SWING SET. Wondering if we'll have another fiasco in Florida? Forgot to renew your subscription to The Detroit Free Press? You already know the election won't be decided in Texas or California -- but do you know what's going on in Arkansas and Oregon? Keep track of the swing-state situation with our new weekly feature, Purple People Watch. Check it out.

ONE MORE FOR THE APPLE CART. I continue to be astounded that there are people out there seriously maintaining that culpability for Abu Ghraib stops at the handful of military police officers who've thus far been charged. Today's Washington Post drives yet another nail into the coffin of the "few bad apples" theory:

Sgt. Samuel Provance said intelligence interrogators told military police to strip down prisoners and embarrass them as a way to help "break" them. The same interrogators and intelligence analysts would talk about the abuse with Provance and flippantly dismiss it because the Iraqis were considered "the enemy," he said.

The first military intelligence soldier to speak openly about alleged abuse at Abu Ghraib, Provance said in a telephone interview from Germany yesterday that the highest-ranking military intelligence officers at the prison were involved and that the Army appears to be trying to deflect attention away from military intelligence's role.

And what do you think the odds are that "the highest-ranking military intelligence officers at the prison" were just off the reservation, doing things that their superiors were totally in the dark about?

--Matthew Yglesias

OUT OF THUNE. It looks like South Dakota senatorial candidate John Thune may have gotten into the lobbying game a little too soon after retiring from Congress in 2003. For those who don't know, former members must wait one year before they lobby their old colleagues. Thune has remained a lobbyist while campaigning against Tom Daschle, and while most of his lobbying has been with the executive branch, disclosure reports filed for 2003 reveals that he did, in fact, lobby Congress. (Click here, and select the year-end report for Laserscope, Inc.) The Boston Globe has the story:

Former congressman John Thune, who is seeking to unseat the Senate Democratic leader in one of the year's most hotly contested Senate races, reported lobbying his former colleagues on Medicare last year, behavior that would have violated laws restricting the activities of former members of Congress.

Thune campaign manager Dick Wadhams denied that the South Dakota Republican lobbied the House in 2003 and said the forms that Thune's firm filed were misleading.

But the 2003 report that Thune's lobbying firm filed with Congress clearly lists Thune as one of eight lobbyists who contacted the House, Senate, and Department of Health and Human Services on behalf of Laserscope Inc., a medical laser systems supplier, last year.

Departing members of Congress are subject to a one-year "cooling off" period, meaning that Thune would not have been allowed to lobby Congress last year.

"That would appear to be a violation of the ethics rules," said Larry Noble of the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks lobbying activity. A staff member for the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, who asked not to be named, said, "On its face, it sounds like a violation of the statute."

Thune's former lobbying colleague, Harry Katrichis, said Thune "did not lobby any member of the House or Senate during the time he worked here."

"The best I can describe it is a clerical error," Katrichis said of the lobbying report filed by his Washington firm, Arent, Fox, Kintner, Plotkin & Kahn.

Uh-uh. Watch how artfully Globe reporter Susan Milligan unpacks Thune's various defenses:

Thune left the House after his narrow defeat in the 2002 Senate race. In 2003, Thune formed The Thune Group and joined Arent, Fox, which he left late last year. On various dates during 2003, Thune signed on as a lobbyist for Laserscope and six other companies, according to disclosure reports by both firms.

Former members of Congress are allowed to lobby federal agencies as soon as they leave office, but cannot lobby their former legislative colleagues. The law does not prohibit members from social contact with former colleagues or enjoying privileges accorded former members, such as walking onto the House and Senate floors or using the House gym.

Those privileges make it hard to determine whether a former legislator is lobbying or merely catching up with old friends, Noble said. "It's hard to monitor this. I'm sure there are times they are just going in for a friendly chat, but a third party might look on [it] as a lobby effort."

Thune "would go to the Hill, work out in the members' gym," Katrichis said. "He still has a lot of friends, particularly on the House side." But Thune "never did any business for any of the firm's clients on the Hill," Katrichis said.

Thune's filings do not back up that statement. While nearly all of Thune's disclosure forms single out his activities as executive branch lobbying, the form for client Laserscope lists Thune as one of a group lobbying Congress as well.

Wadhams said the disclosure form did not give Arent, Fox the opportunity to separate Thune from the list of other firm lobbyists who lawfully contacted the House and Senate.

But all of the other lobbying disclosure reports Thune's firms filed with the Secretary of the Senate specifically list Thune as a lobbyist for executive branch agencies alone. Wadhams countered that the forms have separate pages for each issue and that it was not possible to distinguish Thune from others at the firm lobbying Congress and the executive branch on Medicare.

But in a similar situation, the firm indeed separated out Thune's lobbying activities in its report. In a filing showing lobbying activity for the Motor and Equipment Manufacturers Association, the words "executive branch only" are included after Thune's name to underscore that he did not contact the House or Senate.

Busted! Will the rest of the press pick this up, or will the big boys give Thune a pass because they don't want to admit they got scooped by the Globe?

--Nick Confessore

IS THE HONEYMOON OVER? First the Pentagon cut off his funding. (And about damn time, too.) Now the Associated Press reports that American soldiers raided Ahmed Chalabi's compound in Baghdad:

U.S. soldiers and Iraqi police raided the residence of Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi on Thursday, and aides accused the Americans of holding guns to his head and bullying him over his criticism of plans for next month's transfer of sovereignty.

There was no comment from U.S. authorities, but American officials here have complained privately that Chalabi -- a longtime Pentagon favorite -- is interfering with a U.S. investigation into allegations that Saddam Hussein's regime skimmed millions in oil revenues during the U.N.-run oil-for-food program.

A Chalabi aide, Haidar Musawi, accused the Americans of trying to pressure Chalabi, who has become openly critical of U.S. plans for how much power to transfer to the Iraqis on June 30.

"The aim is to put political pressure," Musawi told The Associated Press. "Why is this happening at a time when the government is being formed?" He said the Americans also raided other offices of Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress.

Salem Chalabi, nephew of Ahmad Chalabi and head of the Iraqi war crimes tribunal, said his uncle told him by telephone that Iraqi and American authorities "entered his home and put the guns to his head in a very humiliating way that reminds everyone of the conduct of the former regime."

The younger Chalabi said the reason for the raid was unclear but "they must be afraid of his political movement."

Yes, that must be it. Because there's no other reason for the Pentagon to be ticked off at the guy.

--Nick Confessore

DISGRUNTLEMENT WATCH, PART ELEVEN. For once, it's pretty easy to tell what Jim Hoagland is trying to say:

If the only way to achieve this is to accept a temporary, de facto partition of Iraq into three zones of autonomy with differing security responsibilities, so be it.

The United States should not set the partition of Iraq as a formal policy goal. But neither should it go back, even covertly, to supporting territorial integrity enforced by state terrorism wielded by a Sunni strongman. . . .

The administration's original case for invading and occupying Iraq has been dismantled almost piece by piece. The large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction that were presumed to be there have not been found.

Iraqis in the free-fire zones that terrorists have established certainly do not feel more secure than they did. And the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal has stained the moral high ground the administration claimed.

This sequence of failure and mishap has robbed the administration of the credibility abroad and national unity at home it needed to carry out its most ambitious regional goals. It must now be realistic and honest about what it can still salvage.

As with left-wing Kurdophile Peter Galbraith's similar proposal, there's a lot of potential problems here. Iraq doesn't actually come divided up into three neat ethnic parts that we can simply split off. Cities like Baghdad and Kirkuk are quite diverse, and without the goal of a pluralistic central government are likely to become the scenes of violent conflict. And it's very hard to see what's supposed to be "temporary" about this partition plan. Nevertheless, it's increasingly clear that just about everyone not on Bush's payroll sees the need to start looking for a new strategy.

--Matthew Yglesias

DISGRUNTLEMENT WATCH, PART TEN. Andrew Sullivan's blog has become a veritable daily diary of disgruntled laments. "Daily Dish" or "Daily Disgruntlement"? You be the judge.

Says Sullivan today:

BUSH'S FAILURE: And the answer cannot be the president's crude and simple rhetorical tropes. What Bush doesn't seem to understand is that in any war, people need to be reminded constantly of what is going on, what is at stake, what our immediate, medium-term and ultimate objectives are. The president has said nothing cogent about Karbala; nothing apposite about al Sadr; nothing specific about what our strategy is in Falluja. Events transpire and are interpreted by critics and the anti-war media and by everyone on the planet but the president. All the president says is a broad and crude reiteration of valid but superfluous boilerplate. This is not war-leadership; it's the abdication of war-leadership. We are at a critical juncture. With some perspective, we have achieved much in Iraq, with relatively low casualties. But it will all go to hell if we lose our nerve now. It's long past time that people can be asked simply to trust the president. After the WMD intelligence debacle and the Abu Ghraib disgrace, he has run out of that capital. He has to tell us how we will win, what we are doing, how it all holds together, why the infrastructure repair is still in disarray, and how a political solution is possible. I'm not sure any more that this president has the skills or competence to pull it off. But I am sure that he has very little time to persuade us he can.

Superfluous boilerplate. Abdication of war-leadership. Those are strong words -- and there's more:

The Republican party is now committed to chronic fiscal irresponsibility, the micro-managing of people's private lives, the subjugation of political to religious discourse, and the politicization of the Constitution. In so many ways, it is an insult to the word "conservative."

Couldn't have put it better myself. The peculiar thing about this moment, which finds many reasonable Republicans despairing over their leader and the direction of their party, is that Sullivan and his correspondents continue to refuse to consider Kerry a viable alternative. National polls have shown a similar refusal on the part of an increasingly disgruntled populace to switch allegiance from Bush to Kerry, and while Bush's approval rating and support on key issues has plummeted, Kerry has made only small gains in support.

The important question, though, is not so much what the polls show now, but what effect this period of Republican disgruntlement will have on Republican turnout come November, and whether Karl Rove's grassroots revival will be able to counteract the likely negative impact of such unhappiness on voter turnout. People like Sullivan can say they continue to support the president despite being unhappy with him, but it is very hard to imagine that any candidate who engenders such dissatisfaction will not see some erosion in his ability to roust people from their beds and homes on a chilly November morning, GOTV or no. People don't like holding their noses when they vote, Republicans any more than Democrats, and I suspect that those people who've lost faith in Bush but can't stomach the thought of Kerry may simply wind up staying home on election day.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE. Some Democrats disapprove of all the John McCain-worship that's been going around. Relax, says Garance Franke-Ruta: It's just good politics.

ARE YOU THREATENING ME? Via Atrios comes a disturbing trend in hawkish commentary. Here's Glenn Reynolds writing yesterday:

And here's a question: Freedom of the press, as it exists today (and didn't exist, really, until the 1960s) is unlikely to survive if a majority -- or even a large and angry minority -- of Americans comes to conclude that the press is untrustworthy and unpatriotic. How far are we from that point?

Stop being mean to the president or I'll lead a mob to your door -- has it come to that? Tony Blankley, meanwhile, moves the theme forward in today's column for The Washington Times, a well-known bastion of journalistic propriety:

But all this potential capacity for victory can only be brought into full being by a sustained act of collective will. It is heartbreaking, though no longer perplexing, that the president's political and media opposition want the president's defeat more than America's victory. But that is the price we must pay for living in a free country. (Sedition laws almost surely would be found unconstitutional, currently -- although things may change after the next terrorist attack in America.)

Poor conservatives, suffering under the burden of "living in a free country" -- one more attack though, and things'll be looking up! Who cares more about partisan victory than national security now?

Two quick points. First, we can have the media bias argument all we want, but it's simply undeniable that a huge number of people -- in the media, in the think tanks, in the government, and on the street -- who were, at one time or another, generally supportive of Bush's Iraq policy have now come to the conclusion that its failing. There's no getting around that fact. And it's implication is clear -- the coverage of the war indicates that the policy is failing because the policy is failing, not because the press is out to get the president. To make this strategy work, you need some new facts, not a new press corps.

Second, really, what kind of newspaper publishes a lament about the unconstitutionality of sedition laws? They ought to be ashamed of themselves.

--Matthew Yglesias

MORE ON THE RESERVES. The indispensable Joe Galloway of Knight-Ridder reports:

The U.S. Army is scraping up soldiers for duty in Iraq wherever it can find them, and that includes places and people long considered off-limits.

The Army on Tuesday confirmed that it pulled the files of some 17,000 people in the Individual Ready Reserve, the nation's pool of former soldiers. The Army has been screening them for critically needed specialists and has called about 100 of them since January.

Under the current authorization from Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the Army could call as many as 6,500 back on active duty involuntarily.

"Yes we are screening them and, yes, we are calling some of them up," an Army spokesman, Col. Joseph Curtin, told Knight Ridder. "We need certain specialties, including civil affairs, military police, some advanced medical specialists, such as orthopedic surgeons, psychological operations, military intelligence interrogators."

The Army has been forced to look to the Individual Ready Reserve pool and elsewhere for soldiers because it's been stretched so thin by a recent decision to maintain American troop levels in Iraq at 135,000 to 138,000 at least through 2005.

The Army is also considering a plan to close its premier training center at Fort Irwin in California so the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, the much-vaunted Opposition Force against which the Army's tank divisions hone their combat skills, would be available for combat duty in Iraq.

Here's the thing. The reserves are there to be called up. That's why we have reserves. But this is still troublesome for several reasons.

First, if you're going to dig into your reserves like this, you need to put the nation on a war footing -- a real war footing, not President Bush's wanna-be Potemkin war footing, where he expects his political opponents to shut up and do whatever he wants in Washington, but doesn't make any sacrifices to his own agenda and, worse, asks for no sacrifices from the American people because it might hurt his re-election. This is key, because by calling up the reserves, Bush is demanding real sacrifices from thousands of communities across the country, and you need to prepare them for it, not skulk around, pretending we have plenty of troops to handle the situation.

Second, once you've begun to dig into your reserves, you'd better have figured out how to replenish them. And there's simply been too much evidence of wishful thinking at the Pentagon for me to be confident that they do have such a plan.

Third, it's scary that we're cannabilizing not only the Korean DMZ forces -- one of the few parts of our Cold War force structure that still looks highly relevant and useful today -- but also, according to Galloway, possibly even the troops we use to train other troops. If that isn't a sign of desparation and massive overstretch, I don't know what is.

Phil Carter (here) and Kevin Drum (here) have more.

--Nick Confessore

DISGRUNTLEMENT WATCH, PARTS SEVEN THROUGH NINE. The latest issue of The Weekly Standard is a veritable hothouse of disgruntlement directed at the Bush administration. Jeffrey Bell says that Donald Rumsfeld doesn't understand the lessons of Vietnam, Frederick Kagan writes that military overstretch is "even worse than you think," and Bill Kristol has a long list of "suggestions" by which the president could save his floundering policies.

Needless to say, none of these writers are about to turn into liberals, and all the articles are dripping with disdain for the Democrats, but it's increasingly clear that no serious people are actually pleased with the Bush administration's performance in office.

--Matthew Yglesias

CUT IT OUT. Yesterday, we learned that Ohio's Timken Company -- which just two months ago President Bush visited to herald the benefits of his tax cut -- is considering laying off nearly a quarter of its Canton workforce. Today, the New York Times reports that the Bush administration has been trumpeting a number of programs that they actually tried to cut or even eliminate:

For example, Justice Department officials recently announced that they were awarding $47 million to scores of local law enforcement agencies for the hiring of police officers. Mr. Bush had just proposed cutting the budget for the program, known as Community Oriented Policing Services, by 87 percent, to $97 million next year, from $756 million.

The administration has been particularly energetic in publicizing health programs, even ones that had been scheduled for cuts or elimination.

Tommy G. Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, announced recently that the administration was awarding $11.7 million in grants to help 30 states plan and provide coverage for people without health insurance. Mr. Bush had proposed ending the program in each of the last three years.

The administration also announced recently that it was providing $11.6 million to the states so they could buy defibrillators to save the lives of heart attack victims. But Mr. Bush had proposed cutting the budget for such devices by 82 percent, to $2 million from $10.9 million.

Whether they involve programs Mr. Bush supported or not, the grant announcements illustrate how the administration blends politics and policy, blurring the distinction between official business and campaign-related activities.

This is kind of the logical endpoint of Bush's disasterous domestic policy agenda. He doesn't have any real successes of his own to run on this fall -- so he's running on other people's successes.

I'm also struck by the ease with which the "flip-flopper" label is attached to Democrats but not Republicans. The irony here is that when John Kerry said "I actually did vote for his $87 billion, before I voted against it," he was actually making a principled position sound weasely; Kerry voted for an appropriations package that would fund the war responsibly by repealing some of Bush's tax cuts, and when that failed, he chose to vote against the Republicans' non-tax-cutting appropriation bill, expecting that the White House would make a compromise if the bill failed rather than leave our troops in the lurch. By contrast, Bush's touting of programs he actually tried to cut or abolish is a true flip-flop: He really was against federally-funded defibrillators before he was for them. Yet why no Bush-as-flip-flopper articles? Even the Times piece declines to frame it that way.

--Nick Confessore

(Ed.: This post originally misidentified Kerry as having voted in favor of the final $87 billion appropriation bill.)

THE PARTY OF DIVORCE. The Hill's Alexander Bolton's pulled together a neat story hassling divorced Republican Senators about the recent onslaught of committee hearings their party's been holding lately dedicated to extolling the virtues of marriage:

Six senior Republican lawmakers are divorced and remarried: Assistant Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), Sen. John Warner (Va.), Sen. Kit Bond (Mo.), Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell (Colo.), Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (Texas) and Sen. John McCain (Ariz.). . . .

I'm not getting into all my personal life. ... All I can say is I got married and I’m the happiest man in town," said Warner.

Bond declared: "I'm very happily married now" and referred additional questions to his press secretary.

Other divorced Republicans were similarly shy about discussing the Senate GOP focus on marriage and whether it might be perceived as hypocritical for divorcés to extol the virtues of healthy marriages.

McConnell declined to respond to two efforts to engage him on the subject of marriage and his personal experience.

Hutchison said, "Marriage is a very important institution in our country, and it's the foundation of our culture," but would not respond to questions of whether it would be incongruent for divorced politicians to tout the joys and benefits of marriage.

All joking aside, however, it really is the case that frequent divorce does much more to undermine the family and the sanctity of marriage and so forth than anything gays and lesbians do. I have my doubts that there's an appropriate federal remedy, but if you want to do something to "save" marriage, that's the neighborhood to look in.

--Matthew Yglesias

DISGRUNTLEMENT WATCH, PART SIX. UPI's Martif Sieff reports that an awful lot of people are mad as hell at the Bush administration, and they're not going to take it anymore:

Indeed, intelligence and regular Army sources have told UPI that senior officers and officials in both communities are sickened and outraged by the revelations of mass torture and abuse, and also by the incompetence involved, in the Abu Ghraib prison revelations. These sources also said that officials all the way up to the highest level in both the Army and the Agency are determined not to be scapegoated, or allow very junior soldiers or officials to take the full blame for the excesses.

President George W. Bush in his weekly radio address Saturday claimed that the Abu Ghraib abuses were only "the actions of a few" and that they did not "reflect the true character of the Untied States armed forces."

But what enrages many serving senior Army generals and U.S. top-level intelligence community professionals is that the "few" in this case were not primarily the serving soldiers who were actually encouraged to carry out the abuses and even then take photos of the victims, but that they were encouraged to do so, with the Army's well-established safeguards against such abuses deliberately removed by high-level Pentagon civilian officials.

Tensions between Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld on the one hand and the Army and the CIA on the other are, of course, nothing new. Indeed, if the national security establishment had been treated this way by a Democratic administration, I expect we would have seen a huge public spat long ago. But Abu Ghraib may well become the straw that broke the camel's back. Keep in mind, too, that related investigations regarding Valerie Plame and WMD intelligence are still ongoing, and that ill-will generated by one issue can easily transfer over to these other topics.

--Matthew Yglesias

CONSERVATIVE HEGEMONY? Writing in The New York Times, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge say liberals could learn a thing or two from the American Conservative Union:

This is the type of partisan anniversary that only one side of America pays attention to -- the side that watches Fox News Channel (the host for the evening was that network's Tony Snow). Yet every Democratic politician in the land could have learned a great deal by attending. It would be going a little far to say that the A.C.U. ought to have celebrated under a banner labeled "Mission Accomplished," but it is because of such groups that the right has out-organized, out-fought and out-thought liberal America over the past 40 years. And the left still shows no real sign of knowing how to fight back.

To consider the ground that liberals have ceded, one must look back at the union's founding in a cramped living-room in 1964, a few days after Lyndon B. Johnson had thrashed the first fully paid-up conservative presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater. Back then, the self-styled "Mr. Conservative" seemed to come from another planet. "When in all our history," asked the political theorist Richard Hofstadter, "has anyone with ideas so bizarre, so archaic, so self-confounding, so remote from the basic American consensus got so far?"

Fast forward to today. A Republican Party that is more conservative than Mr. Goldwater could have imagined controls the White House, Congress, many governors' mansions and a majority of seats in state legislatures. Back in 1964, John Kenneth Galbraith smugly proclaimed: "These, without doubt, are the years of the liberal. Almost everyone now so describes himself." Today, a Gallup poll tells us, twice as many Americans (41 percent) describe themselves as "conservative" than as "liberal" (19 percent).

This is such a piece of entrenched conventional wisdom that I'd probably have to write a whole book to rebut it, but here's the blog-length version. Undoubtedly, since 1964 the GOP has won (or, more recently, "won") a lot of elections, especially presidential elections. But what has this Republican Party that allegedly "is more conservative than Mr. Goldwater could have imagined" actually achieved? Certainly, it hasn't repealed the Civil Rights Act, which Goldwater opposed. The main policy achievement the authors point to -- later in the piece -- is welfare reform, a modification of progressive program that substantially didn't exist until the second Johnson administration's war on poverty.

The largest Johnson-era anti-poverty program, Medicaid, is still with us, as is Medicare for senior citizens, which has only grown more generous (most recently, via a bill passed almost exclusively with Republican votes) since it's creation. Social Security, the centerpiece of the New Deal welfare state, is likewise more generous than it was in 1964. The federal government plays a larger role in funding education than it did in 1964 (and, again, it's role has gotten even larger under the Bush-DeLay regime). Abortion, illegal in 1964, is now legal, anti-sodomy laws were eliminated in the recent past, and today we have gay and lesbian couples getting married in Massacusetts, while civil unions, surely a proposal more liberal than anything Johnson dreamed of, have become the moderate plan.

Indeed, as many people have pointed out (for my money, Nick Confessore's year-old article is still the best on the subject) the Republican Party has essentially abandoned the small-government agenda, a small army of disgruntled conservative think tankers notwithstanding. So while the country certainly does face some serious problems, I don't think some kind of right-wing intellectual hegemony has a great deal to do with it. Likewise, while a better-organized and better-mobilized liberalism would be welcome, the past fourty years of conservatism -- an impressive financial, electoral, and communications apparatus that's utterly incapable of achieving its substantive goals no matter how many elections it wins -- is a terrible model to emulate.

--Matthew Yglesias

AT LAST. Boy, you post some criticism of a Bush administration policy and the very next day they go and change it. If only everything could be so easy:

The United States government has decided to halt monthly $335,000 payments to the Iraqi National Congress, the group headed by Ahmad Chalabi, an official with the group said on Monday.

Mr. Chalabi, a longtime exile leader and now a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, played a crucial role in persuading the administration that Saddam Hussein had to be removed from power. But he has since become a lightning rod for critics of the Bush administration, who say the United States relied on him too heavily for prewar intelligence that has since proved faulty.

Mr. Chalabi's group has received at least $27 million in United States financing in the past four years, the Iraqi National Congress official said. This includes $335,000 a month as part of a classified program through the Defense Intelligence Agency, since the summer of 2002, to help gather intelligence in Iraq. The official said his group had been told that financing will cease June 30, when occupation authorities are scheduled to turn over sovereignty to Iraqis.

But really -- what took them so long? It's been obvious for years -- since before the war started, since before Bush was even in office -- that Chalabi was not a reliable partner in America's Iraq policy. It's hard to measure the damage that the White House's (or, perhaps more to the point, the Pentagon's) faith and him and his operation has done.

--Matthew Yglesias

IT'S DRAFTY IN HERE. A friend of mine who is currently an inactive Army reservist forwarded me some memos he received regarding future mobilizations -- memos that indicate that we are not far from some kind of conscription in the next few years. According to my friend, recruiters are telling inactive reservists that they're going to be called up one way or another eventually, so they might as well sign up now and get into non-Iraq-deploying units while they still can. There's also a "warning order" -- i.e., a heads-up -- from the Army's personnel command that talks about the involuntary transfer of inactive reservists to the active reserves, and thus into units that are on deck for the next few Iraq rotations.

My understanding of how reserve call-ups work is imperfect, but if memory serves, the inactive reservists -- known as the Individual Ready Reserve -- are people who have already fulfilled their term of enlistment but can be called up as individuals if the military needs their particular skills or specialty badly enough. In other words, after a couple of years of dipping into the main reserves -- essentially chewing through them to sustain post-9/11 deployments, the Afghanistan occupation, and then the Iraq invasion -- we're now dipping into the inactive reserves. And if we still need more manpower after that -- well, then we start drafting.

There is no question we do not have enough manpower (among other things) in the active-duty military to sustain our current "operations tempo," as the military wonks call it. And there are many good arguments to be made for reinstating the draft, albeit one that would look very different from the corrupt and unfair Vietnam-era draft. It's worth thinking now about what kind of draft we'd like to see if the need for one becomes inavoidable.

--Nick Confessore

COLONEL PAPPAS SPEAKS. On the heels of the weekend's several investigative reports into Abu Ghraib, The New York Times gets in the game with a leaked report:

The American officer who was in charge of interrogations at the Abu Ghraib prison has told a senior Army investigator that intelligence officers sometimes instructed the military police to force Iraqi detainees to strip naked and to shackle them before questioning them. But he said those measures were not imposed "unless there is some good reason."

The officer, Col. Thomas M. Pappas, commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, also told the investigator, Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, that his unit had "no formal system in place" to monitor instructions they had given to military guards, who worked closely with interrogators to prepare detainees for interviews. Colonel Pappas said he "should have asked more questions, admittedly" about abuses committed or encouraged by his subordinates.

The statements by Colonel Pappas, contained in the transcript of a Feb. 11 interview that is part of General Taguba's 6,000-page classified report, offer the highest-level confirmation so far that military intelligence soldiers directed military guards in preparing for interrogations. They also provide the first insights by the senior intelligence officer at the prison into the relationship between his troops and the military police. Portions of Colonel Pappas's sworn statements were read to The New York Times by a government official who had read the transcript.

This would appear to directly contradict the administration's "a few bad apples" line, though there's still a lot of steps in the chain of command between Colonel Pappas and the Secretary of Defense. Note, however, that the Times got this contradictory information by reading a government report. In other words, the White House has either been lying about this, or else they're just too lazy to read reports before going out and making definitive public statements. Either, frankly, would be somewhat plausible.

The leak of this damaging information by a "government official" also suggests to me that the massive interagency ill-will this administration has managed to foster is about to come around and bite them. The report's 6,000 pages long, and only "portions" of one person's statement were given to the Times. Presumably, would-be leakers or even this same leaker, have plenty more material they can dole out whenever they care to.

--Matthew Yglesias

INEVITABLE VICTORY? James Fallows made an interesting observation in yesterday's New York Times:

A similar battle involves, of all things, weather. In the pre-Internet era, the National Weather Service agreed with its middlemen, the commercial weather services, not to compete with them in certain products. Now, the Internet makes the vast range of the weather service's data available to anyone. In a recent study called "Fair Weather," the National Research Council urged that the service seize this new technological opportunity so that farmers, aviators, city officials and others affected by weather can have free access to information their tax dollars have paid for. Commercial companies, most notably AccuWeather, have been lobbying Congress for rules that would force the National Weather Service to close or restrict some of the excellent free sites it has already opened.

I'm not going to claim to be an expert on this controversy, but it's very hard for me to think of a justification for the commercial outlet's point-of-view on this. The taxpayers fund the National Weather Service, so there's no reason the public shouldn't have direct access to it. Fallows conclusion, though, is strangely panglossian:

No matter how that battle turns out, the public will win the longer war. The Internet's impact on the value of information may still be in flux, but its long-term impact on middlemen is clear.

I don't know about that. There are tons of examples, from grazing fees on public lands to the use of the broadcast spectrum to pharmaceutical companies' exploitation of taxpayer-funded research of businesses successfully lobbying for the creation of rules that let them exploit public resources in just this sort of way. Every once in a while an issue becomes so pressing -- drug prices are probably the best example -- that there's a chance something will be done about it in the future. Most of the time, though, the issue is something that manages to fly beneath the public radar screen. It's certainly hard to imagine anyone changing their vote in, say, a tight Senate race over this National Weather Service issue.

By contrast, it's easy to imagine AccuWeather deciding to give a candidate financial support based on his position on this issue. The attitude that technology will conquer all is comforting, but realistically it seems likely that we won't see nearly as many benefits from it as we theoretically could.

--Matthew Yglesias

WHAT WE'RE UP AGAINST. The Weekly Standard has a highly informative article about the life and times of Abu Zarqawi, the man behind some of the more gruesome activities in Iraq lately, possibly including the assassination of an IGC member early today. The conclusion sums up the current problem rather nicely:

Zarqawi exemplifies Sunni terrorism after 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, what some call "al Qaeda 2.0." The Western counteroffensive decimated al Qaeda's leadership, stripped the organization of safe havens and training camps, and disrupted its command and control. Former al Qaeda subsidiaries became franchises, receiving inspiration from bin Laden's occasional messages but operating independently. Historically speaking, the dynamic of revolutionary movements favors the most radical faction--the Jacobins, not the Girondists, the Bolsheviks, not the Menshiviks. If this dynamic prevails in contemporary Sunni terrorism, Abu Musab al Zarqawi represents the future.

What the Standard leaves out is the part of the story -- aptly detailed on Friday by Fred Kaplan -- where the president passes up several opportunities to kill Zarqawi because he was needed alive for the sake of the political theater that built public support for invading Iraq. Now if you believe -- as the president seems to have -- that topping Saddam would somehow magically make the global terrorism problem go away, this may look like a smart decision. Back in the real world, though, the current state of affairs in Iraq has only made it easier than ever for Zarqawi to operate freely.

--Matthew Yglesias

KERRY'S TEAM. The AP calls them the “latest political odd couple: Arianna Huffington, “the chic, wealthy Republican-turned-populist pundit,” and Joe Trippi, “the rumpled, tobacco-chewing Internet-savvy steward of Howard Dean's upstart presidential campaign,” have teamed up to help guide John Kerry’s presidential campaign.

Here's the open letter they've co-authored:

Let Bush own September 11th and the politics of fear. You should own September 12th - the spirit of generosity and community that poured forth in the aftermath of the attacks - and the politics of hope.

Offer voters a bold moral vision of what America can be. A vision that is
bigger than the things that divide us. A vision that brings hope and soul back
to our politics and appeals to more than voters' narrow self-interests. A
vision that makes America once again a respected force for good in the
world.

--Rob Anderson

FAHRENHEIT 9-11. Greetings from Cannes, where I caught a screening early this morning (French time) of Michael's Moore's hugely anticipated new film about America after September 11. It’s notoriously hard to assess a film right in the middle of a festival, when your brain is sauteed from seeing way too much already. But here are a few quick observations.

Moore has adeptly gathered footage of stuff we've only read about these past four years, or glimpsed in a static photograph, or lived through but nearly forgotten, and it's quite an experience to see it all in one place. With humor that doesn't lessen the pang, Moore revisits that brief moment when liberals tasted victory on Election Night 2000. He shows us a frightened, passive President Bush on the morning of September 11, continuing his photo-op with Florida schoolchildren for several minutes after he was notified that the nation was under terrorist attack. John Ashcroft gets a big laugh singing a saccharine inspirational song written by John Ashcroft. Above all, Moore shows footage of and interviews with US soldiers, at home and on duty in Iraq, where they were captured by freelance camera crews. All kinds of soldiers: sensitive, jocularly abusive, confused, trying to do their best, bitter, grievously wounded. Though Moore tries out his usual confrontational gimmicks on some congressmen (winning fewer laughs than he does with his wittily edited footage), he appears far less in this film than in his previous ones. As a result, the images flow; in places, they even achieve a kind of sad beauty.

The basic argument is that the war is unjust and unnecessarily risking troops' lives. But Moore bogs down in exploring Bush's extensive Saudi connections (though there's a good catch in the revelation that James Bath, a bin Laden family adviser in Houston and an early business partner of Bush's, was also suspended from National Guard duty for failing to get a medical in '72, and that his name was subsequently blacked out of the record). Financial gain from oil can't be the only motive at work here. I would have liked more grappling with the neocons' mad sincerity.

He also bites off a few more themes than he can chew, and the film starts to feel a bit overstuffed. He does a public service by airing lots of documented facts (about the scandalous underfunding of Homeland Security, for instance, and callous attempts to cut Veterans benefits) that haven't penetrated the public consciousness. But he tendentiously insinuates more accusations than he proves.

This was the first of four press screenings of the film here, so conventional wisdom won't settle in for a while yet. And I missed Moore's press conference because I had to go see something else (we actually do have to work at these things). There was definitely robust applause from a chunk of the audience. If everyone wasn’t clapping, that is mostly a reflection of the fact that Fahrenheit 9-11 isn't the kind of film that invites a giddily collective audience response. You've laughed, but you've also seen death and disillusionment; when the house lights go up, you're left in a very private space. There is some potent stuff here -- and, for all the posturing hype around Moore's fight with Disney, there's far less irksome smugness than there was in Bowling For Columbine. Maybe that's an upside to living in an increasingly unstable world. Who has time anymore for smug?

--Sarah Kerr

NO NEW CULTURE WAR? Prospect contributor E.J. Graff argues in The New Republic that Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, the Massachusetts court decision that opened the way for same-sex marriage in that state, will produce the opposite effect of Roe v. Wade -- that is, it will not produce an entrenched and bitter culture war. Here's the key bit:

Before Roe, abortion-rights supporters could trigger waves of emotion by waving coat hangers, thus evoking painful memories of women dead or maimed in botched back-alley abortions. With abortion legal for more than 30 years, those bloody memories are gone, leaving pro-choice arguments to sound like abstractions. No abortion-rights supporter, of course, laments the fact that American women no longer die from illegal abortions; but it does make the pro-choice side a bit more difficult to illustrate on television, where so much national policy discussion is shaped. We're now left to debate the inner lives of quivering ultrasound images. As a result, national opinion has remained basically deadlocked for 30 years: About 25 percent think abortion should always be legal, about 55 percent believe it should sometimes be legal, and about 20 percent think it should always be banned.

Goodridge will have the opposite effect on public opinion: Unlike Roe, it will give the progressive side more visual aids, not fewer. Until Roe, the abortion debate was about real damage to real women's lives; afterwards, it was about the moral abstraction of whether fetuses are people. Until Goodridge, the same-sex marriage debate was entirely about abstractions; now it will be about real couples' sorrows and joys. The conservative argument that "marriage has always been this way"--except in Canada, the Netherlands, and Belgium, which have had same-sex marriages for between one and three years--was an effective argument for caution. But once those two nice girls down the street get their marriage license and the Earth doesn't rumble, opponents will have to play on very different political terrain. From now on, what we talk about when we talk about same-sex marriage will be real live coworkers, cousins, and friends. The debate will no longer be about abstract cultural values; it will be about people. Newlyweds make great B-roll footage, as we saw this past winter in San Francisco. Once same-sex marriage is no longer abstract but particular, its opponents will start to seem really cranky--and really, really mean.

I share Graff's view. When San Franciso first allowed gay marriage, I wrote that I thought it would be "the political equivalent of looking under one's bed in the light of day, and realizing that monster was just an old sweatshirt covered in dust bunnies," and that "as the notion of gays being married becomes a banal reality and not a worriesome hypothetical, the discomfort will begin to fade among many people." It's too early to tell whether that instinct is correct -- but we can hope.

UPDATE: Kevin has also been thinking about this recently, and adds some hopeful anectodal evidence: Calls for a constitutional amendment apparently have gotten little traction even among the religious right.

--Nick Confessore

THE COUP OF 2012. According to Salon's Sidney Blumenthal, senior members of the officer corps have been re-reading this fascinating 1992 essay from Parameters, the journal of the Army War College. Written by an officer named Charles Dunlap (at the time he was a colonel; now he's a general), the essay, titled "The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012," is quite a trip. Extrapolating out from then-current trends -- among them the growing ideological homogenization and intellectual and geographic isolation of the armed forces, politicians' eagerness to involve the armed forces in all manner of non-military tasks, and citizens' loss of faith in the ability of the government to solve problems -- the piece sketches out a future in which the head of the armed forces takes control of the United States, with little resistance.

I read it this morning. It's quite an exercise, and it contains a little provocative something for everyone. Given the inevitable excess of such cautionary tales, I think there much in Dunlap's piece worth thinking about. Drug warriors of the right and left will wonder whether it makes sense to involve so many soldiers in busting marijuana smugglers. Liberals should wonder whether it really makes sense to agitate for the banning of ROTC programs from elite college-campuses, which increases the proportion of the officer corps coming from traditionally conservative service academies and military schools. The service chiefs themselves will wonder whether the transformation of regional command heads into de facto American proconsuls is worth the budgetary power and prestige they've gained relative to the traditional diplomatic corps. And so forth. Read it, and ponder.

--Nick Confessore

LIES AND THE LYING LIARS WHO FINANCE THEM. The New York Times has a good summary of one of the more interesting segments of Colin Powell's Meet The Press appearance yesterday:

But on Sunday, Mr. Powell argued that the C.I.A. itself was misled, and that in turn he was, too. "Unfortunately, that multiple sourcing over time has turned out not to be accurate," Mr. Powell said, going farther than he did on April 2 when he conceded that the intelligence was not "that solid."

On Sunday, Mr. Powell hinted at widespread reports of fabrications by an engineer who provided much of the most critical information about the labs. Intelligence officials have since found that the engineer was linked to the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group that was pressing President Bush to unseat Mr. Hussein.

Unfortunately, since Powell aides were already itching to get him off the air, there wasn't time for the obvious follow-up question: Why is the United States still giving the INC money in exchange for their "intelligence" services?

--Matthew Yglesias

RUSH LIMBAUGH, FRAIDY-CAT. What I find interesting about the decision by WMAL, the Washington, D.C. radio station that carries Rush Limbaugh's show, to turn down an ad critical of Limbaugh, is that all the ad really does is quote Limbaugh's own words back to him (alongside a quote from Don Rumsfeld). The words in question are, of course, Limbaugh's inane comment that the torture of Iraqi prisoners was no worse than a Skull & Bones initiation. So turning down the ad is in itself an admission that Limbaugh said something stupid.

--Nick Confessore

WEEKEND UPDATE. Distracted by the looming plague of locusts? Here's what you missed:

The Columnists

• David Brooks. Who needs a reason to dedicate another column to Columbine?
• Nicholas Kristof. At least we're big in Iran.
• George Will. Segregation was bad.
• Jim Hoagland. Hindu nationalism reminds me of Star Wars, so I like it.
• David Broder. Kerry is a weak, flip-flopping weakling.
• Thomas Freidman. We need Iraq's silent majority to speak up, but leaving out the part where they want us to go home.
• Maureen Dowd. The Bush administration is like the Trojan War but not, you know, in any specific way.

The Op-Ed You Actually Need To Read

• Adriana Lins de Albuquerque, et. al. on where things stand in Iraq.

--Matthew Yglesias

LYING TO THE SUPREME COURT? On the subject of the need for better oversight, blogger and law professor Eric Muller's got something that really could use some looking into:

So we now know that the Justice Department has been involved in reviewing and approving methods of interrogation that have been used in at least some post-9/11 cases.

Given that, I think it now fair to inquire--and I hope a relevant congressional committee will do so--whether the Solicitor General's office knew, or could have known through the exercise of ordinary diligence, that our executive was using techniques of "mild torture" in interrogating prisoners of war and enemy combatants. Did Deputy Solicitor General Paul Clement make a knowingly or recklessly false assertion to the United States Supreme Court in order to bolster the government's legal position?

The subject is Clement's contention in oral arguments on the Padilla and Hamdi cases that the US government doesn't engage in even "mild torture" to try and secure information from detainees. This is going to wind up hinging on whether or not various "stress and duress" interrogation techniques count as torture -- certainly this stuff sounds a lot like torture to me.

It also seems noteworthy that the administration's positions in these cases was that judicial oversight of the treatment of enemy combattants was unwarranted and that the appropriate remedy for mistreatment on the part of the executive branch was for the voters to hold the executive accountable. Just saying.

--Matthew Yglesias

DISGRUNTLEMENT WATCH, PART FIVE. Yesterday's edition of The Hill reports that the House GOP is mad as hell:

One GOP lawmaker at the caucus meeting said Hastert "expressed outright dismay with the White House staff for the way the transportation bill had been handled. They did not give the priority necessary to the issue in resolving it as the Speaker had wanted. It’s in absolute limbo."

A rank-and-file lawmaker said: "Hastert was frustrated and disappointed that he had not been dealt with openly and fairly and given accurate information. He was not so much speaking to the conference as he was speaking for the conference."

The catalog of GOP complaints against the executive branch is long. A senior Republican House member said his colleagues frequently disparqage the White House communications team, particularly on articulating its policy in Iraq.

He said there was frustration about a lack of White House effort in pushing the FSC/ETI bill, designed to replace corporate subsidies with tax breaks.

And in March, the Speaker told The Hill that the White House was doing a poor job selling its economic policies.

The are also widespread complaints among lawmakers that the administration's message machine is out of sync. When, for example, the House passed a bill in March raising penalties for violence against pregnant woman, the White House dimished the political impact by trumping it with the announcement that it would support a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, even though key House leaders were not on board.

The trouble here is that every indication is that they are going to take it anymore. The proximate cause of this blowup is the transportation bill, which the White House has been threatening to veto as a spurious gesture of fiscal responsibility (domestic discretionary spending has very little to do with the structural budget imbalance). The Republican congressional leadership had it in their power to send something over there and see if Bush, who's never vetoed anything, would be willing to follow-through on their threat. Instead, they've worked to kill the bill ("it's on life support with four hands pulling at the cord," in a colorful description I heard yesterday), thus sparing the president the embarassment of an internecine fight.

More broadly, congressional oversight during the Bush years has been absolutely abysmal even when -- as in the case of the Medicare cost cover-up -- Republican members of congress have been the main victims. As the article goes on to point out, squabbles between a president and congressmen of his own party are historically normal, but the congress normally tries to do something about their complaints, not just gripe behind closed doors.

--Matthew Yglesias

PETERS ON RUMSFELD. Everyone's favorite ornery, hard-ass retired military officer/pundit, Ralph Peters, has a particularly compelling column in the New York Post today. It's notable not merely because Peters calls for Don Rumsfeld to resign, but because he captures some of the ways in which Rumsfeld's version of military "transformation" gets things wrong:

What of that much-touted transformation so beloved of the neocons? In fact, it's just a plain old con, with nothing neo about it. The Office of the Secretary of Defense hasn't canceled one of the real budget-buster weapons systems designed for the Cold War and kept alive by lobbyists. Only the low-end Crusader artillery piece went to the chopping block as a token (the Army itself decided to cancel the Comanche helicopter).

Rumsfeld's "vision" was to lavish money on the defense industry and administration-friendly contractors, while sending too few troops to war, with too little battlefield equipment, inadequate supplies and no long-range plan. As one Army colonel put it in the heat of battle, "We're winning this despite OSD."

Contractors grow rich. The Army grows exhausted. And every single prediction about the future of warfare made by the Rumsfeld gang proved incorrect. Airpower doesn't win wars on its own. Technology doesn't trump courage, guts and skill. Both war and its aftermath still require adequate numbers of well-trained, disciplined troops. And serious planning.

We need a bigger Army. We got a bigger budget -- but the money is going to CEOs, not to G.I. Joe.

Outsourcing? We see now where that gets us. In Rumsfeld's military, you even outsource leadership. As we did at Abu Ghraib prison.

Even if none of the above mattered, Rumsfeld needs to go because he has utterly lost the trust of the officer corps. He isn't a leader. He's an arrogant ideologue unfit to serve our democracy.

Make no mistake: The military, and especially the army, does need to transform itself to meet the challenges of the post-Cold War era. But it's important that we transform the military to fight the wars we are going to fight, not the ones we'd like to fight. That means lots of peacekeeping, lots of post-conflict operations, and lots of boots on the ground, whether as part of the active-duty Army or some as-yet-non-existent fifth branch of the Pentagon.

--Nick Confessore

DISGRUNTLEMENT WATCH, PART FOUR. The latest National Review staff editorial contains a significant hint of disgruntlement:

But the Army, running up the chain of command through the Pentagon to the commander-in-chief, was slow to recognize the impact that the story, and especially its images, would have. In a revealing comment during his otherwise successful testimony before Congress, secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld said he hadn't "been focused on the war of ideas, to be honest with you." Time we focused. The Terror War, in all its multifarious pieces, is fought on many places besides the battlefield

Now you might think the realization that the Bush administration is not focused at all on what's arguably the most important element in American counterterrorism strategy would provoke some further reflections, but instead they move on to talk about the evils of the gender-integrated military, and John McCain. Still, there's only so much disgruntlement one can expect from The National Review.

--Matthew Yglesias

GIVING AS GOOD AS THEY GET. Media Matters for America, the partisan media watchdog group founded by former right-wing enfant terrible David Brock and publicly launched just over a week ago, is already making good on its promise to stir things up in unexpected ways. This week, the left-leaning group is taking up the take-no prisoners techniques of the right-wing media and using them against a very fat right-wing target: Rush Limbaugh.

Yesterday, Media Matters announced plans to run television ads holding Limbaugh accountable for his repulsive remarks dismissing the torture at Abu Ghraib as little more than a college fraternity prank:

Media Matters for America today launched an aggressive television ad campaign spotlighting highly controversial comments on the torture of Iraqi prisoners made by Rush Limbaugh, the political commentator with the largest radio listenership in the U.S. The 30-second ad contrasts the Bush Administration's denunciation of Iraqi prisoner torture with Limbaugh's May 4th statements comparing the torture to a college fraternity prank and people 'having a good time.'

VOICEOVER: 'SECRETARY RUMSFELD CALLED THE TORTURE OF IRAQIS SADISTIC...CRUEL...'

RUMSFELD: 'FUNDAMENTALLY UN-AMERICAN.'

VOICEOVER: 'BUT HERE'S WHAT RUSH LIMBAUGH SAID:'

LIMBAUGH: 'THIS IS NO DIFFERENT THAN WHAT HAPPENS AT THE SKULL & BONES INITIATION...I'M TALKING ABOUT PEOPLE HAVING A GOOD TIME. THESE PEOPLE -- YOU EVER HEARD OF EMOTIONAL RELEASE? YOU EVER HEARD OF NEEDING TO BLOW SOME STEAM OFF?'

VOICEOVER: 'THIS IS THE MOST LISTENED-TO POLITICAL COMMENTATOR IN AMERICA?'

The ads will run in DC media markets on CNBC, CNN, ESPN, FOX News, and MSNBC. Limbaugh, for his part, doesn't seem to like the taste of his own medicine.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

THE GROWN-UPS WIN IN VIRGINIA. A couple of weeks ago, I argued that the debate over Virginia's budget plan was a "test for whether late-stage conservatism is, on the subject of paying for government, merely dogma unmoored from responsibility." On the one hand, you had Gov. Mark Warner, statehouse Democrats, and a group of brave Republicans hammering out a compromise budget that would, among other things, raise taxes to pay for the things Virginians say they want government to provide. On the other were most Republicans and a very large array of state and national anti-tax activists who believed fervently that taxes can never, ever, be raised. Since Virginia can't deficit spend like the feds, the GOP couldn't have its cake and eat it, too (the way President Bush, for example, has). So they had to make some tough choices.

This Washington Post article gives the tick-tock on the negotiations, and is about as detailed an article on a state's budgetary process as you're ever likely to find. In the end, enough Republicans showed their mettle that the compromise passed.

--Nick Confessore

DISGRUNTLEMENT WATCH, PART III. Jefferson Morley scans the globe and finds that many of the newspapers around the world that backed Bush and the war in Iraq are having serious doubts:

In the ranks of journalism, they were the coalition of the willing: the newspapers that supported President Bush's decision to invade Iraq in March 2003.

These news outlets made the case for overthrowing Saddam Hussein, often in the face of strong anti-war feelings in their countries. Their editorials lent credibility and moral support to the White House's claims that the U.S.-led war had international backing.

Today, they are having second thoughts.

"Rumsfeld will have to go," declares an editorial in the Australian, the national daily founded in 1964 by an aspiring young businessman named Rupert Murdoch....

The editors of the Scotsman, a conservative daily in Edinburgh, said "the question is whether or not maintaining the morale of the soldiery in Iraq is a purpose best served by the survival of a defence secretary who is widely perceived to have lost the confidence of the country and the world."...

Their recommendation: Rumsfeld should resign....

In the reliably conservative Daily Telegraph, columnist Jenny McCartney said she was confused by Rumsfeld's statement that he would "resign in a minute" if he felt he could not be an effective leader.

"On that basis, he should be gone already: he has already proved an ineffective leader, and will be much less effective in the wake of this miserable scandal. For what has leaked out of Abu Ghraib, along with the stomach-churning whiff of chaos and sadism, is the fundamental incompetence in the running of the US military from the top down. "

...at least one war supporter is abandoning the cause altogether.

Toronto Star columnist John Derringer writes that he thought "like so many millions of others did, that the American forces would be in and out of there before you could say Grenada."

"I truly believed that Saddam would be toppled and a new government set up within a year, with minimal American casualties."

Now, he says the war "is no longer about freedom or terror. It's about one man's political agenda, and dead American soldiers are obviously not about to get in his way. I thought it was about more than that. I was wrong."

I get the feeling I'm going to be hearing that line a lot more in the weeks to come.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

HOW REPUBLICANS RAISE SOFT MONEY. There's talk that, with the Federal Election Commission having decided not to stop 527s from raising and spend soft money, Republican donors will finally get in the act. You could find some humor in the fact that the earlier wave of GOP attacks on the Democratic 527s are thus revealed as purely completely unprincipled, but I'm more interested in where the money is going to go.

I just published an article showing that, in fact, the GOP doesn't need 527s as much -- not just because they can raise more hard money, but also because they're more aggressive and smart about laundering soft money through a network of front groups organized as 501(c). (The gritty details are here.) I think that's still true. There are a couple of Republican 527s set up, such as the Leadership Forum, which was established by a former Tom DeLay aide. But I would look for them to start hoovering up soft money mainly from individuals, which is only about a quarter of the GOP soft-money pie. Partly because individuals who give to the 527s don't pay the gift tax on those donations, whereas they do pay it on donations to the type of 501(c)s the GOP has set up. And partly because the GOP can use the Republican Governors Association 527 as a way to legally funnel soft money from individual donors -- who like that the RGA was spun-off from the official party organizations and has some cachet -- to state and county parties.

The 501(c) groups I wrote about are useful for corporations and trade associations who don't want to alienate members of congress they may need to ask for favors down the road. They can give money in secret to the front 527s and still lobby freely on the Hill. Additionally, because the GOP has been so successful at co-opting mainline trade organizations on K Street and putting loyal Republican operatives at the helms of those groups (or at least in charge of their issue ad campaigns), corporations can cut out the middleman, diverting the soft money they used to give to the Republican campaign committees into traditional, politically-active trade groups such as PhRMA and the Chamber of Commerce. Those groups then run aggressive issue-ad campaigns -- campaigns that are often run by ad consultants who also work for, say, the Republican National Committee. (If I'm mistaken, GOP ad man Alex Castellanos has issue-ad contracts for the RNC, Bush-Cheney '04, and PhRMA.)

In other words, they have a very well-oiled machine, have other ways they can raise and spend soft money effectively, and need not be as dependent on 527s as the Democrats are. So if in three months you see articles about how the GOP 527s aren't raising that much soft money, remember that the money is most definitely going somewhere else.

--Nick Confessore

SO VERY GRUNTLED. Over at The Wall Street Journal Online, erstwhile classicist Victor Davis Hanson is ready to blame just about everyone imaginable -- Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Michel Foucault, and even American public opinion -- for the current problems we face. Except, of course, George W. Bush who, along with Hanson, emerges as the lone hero from his long discursive tale:

In contrast, George W. Bush, impervious to such self-deception, has, in a mere 2 1/2 years, reversed the perilous course of a quarter-century. Since Sept. 11, he has removed the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, begun to challenge the Middle East through support for consensual government, isolated Yasser Arafat, pressured the Europeans on everything from anti-Semitism to their largesse to Hamas, removed American troops from Saudi Arabia, shut down fascistic Islamic "charities," scattered al Qaeda, turned Pakistan from a de facto foe to a scrutinized neutral, rounded up terrorists in the United States, pressured Libya, Iran and Pakistan to come clean on clandestine nuclear cheating, so far avoided another Sept. 11--and promises that he is not nearly done yet. If the Spanish example presages further terrorist attacks on European democracies at election time, at least Mr. Bush has made it clear that America--alone if need be--will neither appease nor ignore such killers but in fact finish the terrible war that they started.

Please. How seriously, really, does Bush take this war? Seriously enough to fund homeland security? No. Seriously enough to follow through on his promised Marshall Plan for Afghanistan? No. Seriously enough to commit adequate troops to Iraq? No. Seriously enough to consider actually paying for any of his foreign ventures? No. Seriously enough to try and bring any of the war supporters in the Democratic Party into his administration? No. Seriously enough to propose a real democracy initiative for the "greater Middle East?" No. Seriously enough to hold any of the members of his administration accountable for their various mistakes? No.

Instead, he takes it just about as seriously as Hanson does. Seriously enough to be turned into a bludgeon with which to attack whoever disagrees with him about anything.

--Matthew Yglesias

THAT'LL WORK. Republican congressman Tom Tancredo wants to ban live coverage of congressional hearings, on the theory that they inspire "political posturing," reports The Hill.

Great idea! Because we stop broadcasting hearings, politicians will stop posturing. Um, yes.

--Nick Confessore

MCCAIN AS SECDEF? TNR's Noam Scheiber thinks talk of John McCain as Secretary of Defense in a Kerry administration is even more unlikely than a McCain vice presidency:

Unlike the idea of McCain as vice president, the position to which the McCain boomlet was initially confined, the McCain-as-defense secretary idea strikes me as particularly likely to alienate the Democratic base. Unless you happen to be serving George W. Bush, a vice president's views on any particular issue are less important than a top-level cabinet secretary's views on the issue he happens to be in charge of. And, of course, defense is probably the issue on which McCain is furthest out of step with Democratic voters.

I don't think this is right. The issue on which McCain is furthest out of step with Democratic voters is probably abortion and Democrats are much more likely to accept a pro-life defense secretary than a pro-life Vice President. It's important to note here that while there are a number of well-organized and well-financed feminist groups who can veto nominees they object to while there's no organized "peace lobby" that can exert leverage over the Kerry campaign.

Besides which, Kerry's position on sending more troops to Iraq is already so wildly at-odds with the opinions of his base that he's pretty much bet the store on the notion that Bush-hating voters won't abandon him en masse for Ralph Nader. Under the circumstances, taking some kind of bold step to try and ensure that he gets some credit from dissilusioned hawks for bucking his base seems like a smart move. The real sticking point is that McCain, awkwardly, is co-chair of the Bush campaign in Arizona, and it's hard to see Kerry getting a lot of mileage out of association with McCain unless he can actually get his endorsement.

--Matthew Yglesias

RUMSFELD MUST GO, DAY 8. As Donald Rumsfeld tours Abu Ghraib, neoconservative disgruntlement with the administration's slow and inadequate response to the abuse scandal is rising. As my colleague Matthew Yglesias notes below, Iraq war enthusiast and proud neocon Max Boot, today -- in a surprising and significant defection from the administration line -- joined the chorus calling for Rumsfeld's ouster.

The real issue here is whether the president is more interested in preserving his own future or America's. Thomas Friedman, writing with the angry honesty of the newly betrayed, lays out the case that George W. Bush and Karl Rove are putting America second to Bush's electoral aspirations in handling this matter:

I thought the administration would have to do the right things in Iraq — from prewar planning and putting in enough troops to dismissing the secretary of defense for incompetence — because surely this was the most important thing for the president and the country. But I was wrong. There is something even more important to the Bush crowd than getting Iraq right, and that's getting re-elected and staying loyal to the conservative base to do so.

What's really striking about both these editorials is the extent to which the administration has lost the benefit of the doubt that its policy allies for so long had granted it. For three and a half years editorialists argued the administration's missteps away, under the misimpression that they shared the same ultimate goals even when that was clearly not the case. Now that scandal has stripped the Bush administration's self-interest naked, it seems unlikely that Bush will be able to regain the trust and confidence of those who had previously taken a shine to his idealistic rhetoric.

It was said that Sept. 11 ended America's vacation from history, making us newly serious. But what Abu Ghraib has shown is that, in fact, 9-11 simply cast a new spell upon the nation, urging us in directions we are now recoiling from in disgust. The administration routinely and repeatedly invoked 9-11 to justify its evasions of international law in the treatment of prisoners, as well as to justify policies from the invasion of Iraq to opposing abortion. But the horrors of Abu Ghraib have loosened the grip of 9-11, and it now seem likely that there will be more hard-headed, clear-eyed evaluations of the president and the conduct of our foreign affairs than previously possible. Sept. 11 began a new epoch in American history; Abu Ghraib has ended its first chapter.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

DISGRUNTLEMENT WATCH, TWO. Max Boot, who's been one of the least-gruntled neocons out there for quite some time, is ready to sack Don Rumsfeld. He expends some effort trying to explain why the Secretary of Defense isn't really all that responsible for the prisoner abuse scandal before concluding:

What, then, is the case for Rumsfeld resigning? Simply that this scandal has caused devastating damage to America's moral standing in the world, and we need to recover fast. Apologizing ad nauseam isn't going to do it. Even court-martialing the perpetrators, though important, isn't enough. We need to regain the initiative as more nightmarish pictures emerge.

Having the Defense secretary resign might salvage some good out of this house of horrors by causing Arabs to ask why their governments tolerate torture and ours doesn't. If the resignation were coupled with other steps, such as moving up the date of Iraq's first election and beefing up U.S. forces, it might even help to put Iraq back on track.

Against this prospect, what are the arguments for keeping Rumsfeld? Dick Cheney's claim that "Don Rumsfeld is the best secretary of Defense the United States has ever had" doesn't pass the laugh test. (Did former Defense Secretary Cheney mean to say that he himself wasn't as good?)

Rumsfeld has done many laudable things, but he has also miscalculated badly about many aspects of the Iraq occupation, and he has alienated much of the military. It is farfetched to claim that the war on terrorism would falter without him.

Boot frames this in a worthwhile way -- it's notable just how incredibly weak the case for Rumsfeld is. No one is entitled to a job in the American cabinet, and no one off the White House payroll seems to genuinely believe he's been doing a stellar job at the Pentagon lately. The only real argument for keeping him is that firing Rumsfeld would create a politically awkward situation for the president. That's just not a good enough reason.

--Matthew Yglesias

DISGRUNTLEMENT WATCH: Republicans for Kerry. Well, there's no official organization -- yet. But, as Eric Konigsberg reports in a Talk of the Town piece in this week's New Yorker, there are quite a few of them out there.

Exhibit A is Grant Winthrop, who works for an investment advisory firm in New York. He had been a "party loyalist" for years, donating money to Rick Lazio's Senate campaign against Hillary Clinton and supporting the Republican cause. But last year, he started getting concerned about "the Republican Party’s rightward turn," writes Konigsberg. And now he's serving on the finance committee of Kerry's campaign in New York. Recently, he gave a fundraiser at the Sheraton in New York. One of his guests was Theodore Roosevelt IV, "one of Bush's more vocal Republican critics," writes Konigsberg. It's a start.

--Tara McKelvey

NOTHING TO SEE HERE. As we all know, the United States would never implement a policy of torturing prisoners:

In the case of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a high-level detainee who is believed to have helped plan the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, C.I.A. interrogators used graduated levels of force, including a technique known as "water boarding," in which a prisoner is strapped down, forcibly pushed under water and made to believe he might drown.

These techniques were authorized by a set of secret rules for the interrogation of high-level Qaeda prisoners, none known to be housed in Iraq, that were endorsed by the Justice Department and the C.I.A. The rules were among the first adopted by the Bush administration after the Sept. 11 attacks for handling detainees and may have helped establish a new understanding throughout the government that officials would have greater freedom to deal harshly with detainees.

I might point out that this stuff isn't exactly news. Way back in October, 2003 Mark Bowden wrote "The Dark Art of Interrogation" for The Atlantic which got into all this and more. Admittedly, it's hard to work up an enormous amount of sympathy for a guy like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other al-Qaeda leaders who are being subjected to nothing harsher than the sort of suffering they've dedicated their lives to dishing out.

Part of what we're seeing at Abu Ghraib, though, is how hard it is to use "just a little" torture. Bowden quotes an intelligence official as saying that "What's needed is a little bit of smacky-face" and when a little bit of smacky-face doesn't work, you start in with a little more smacky-face, and then a little more. You start out using "coercive" techniques on only the very most high-value detainees, but since there's no real limit to the demand for intelligence it starts spreading down the chain. Worse, once it becomes known that the political leadership is willing to wink and nod at this sort of conduct, lower-level people under pressure to get results have every incentive to push the boundaries ever-further. Lately, we've been seeing the ugly end-result.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE MACHINE EXPANDS. When the GOP tried to get Democratic chief lobbyist Julie Domenick booted from the Investment Company Institute -- the mutual fund trade association -- last year, there was a big hubbub, and Domenick stayed. (For an explanation of why it's so crucial for a Republican to head the ICI, I would recommend this piece.) But close watchers noted that, shortly after, ICI hired a former Newt Gingrich aide to work alongside Domenick, which looked an awful lot like the first step towards a quiet exit for her. Looks like that's what happened. Today's Washington Post reports that Domenick is finally leaving ICI -- which means that Republicans can expect more help from the trade group the next time it ramps up the campaign for Social Security privatization.

--Nick Confessore

CHEAP SHOT. Spinsanity's Brendan Nyhan nails the Weekly Standard in a really silly attack on State Department chief of staff Larry Wilkerson. You'll recall that, in Wil Hylton's GQ profile of Colin Powell, Wilkerson was quoted saying of the Standard's neocon brethren:

I have some reservations about people who have never been in the face of battle, so to speak, who are making cavalier decisions about sending men and women out to die. A person who comes immediately to mind in that regard is Richard Perle, who, thank God, tendered his resignation and no longer will be even a semiofficial person in this administration...I call them utopians. I don't care whether utopians are Vladimir Lenin on a sealed train to Moscow or Paul Wolfowitz. Utopians, I don't like. You're never going to bring utopia, and you're going to hurt a lot of people in the process of trying to do it.

That strikes me, and no doubt many other people, as a pithy and indubitably accruate observation of neoconservative thinking, especially with regards to Iraq. But to the Standard, it sounds like, er, something Louis Farrakhan said. They pair Wilkerson's statement with one from Farrakhan under the title "Separated at Birth?" Here's what Farrakhan said:

Now when President Bush became the president, many of these people came into government: . . . Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of state . . . Richard Perle, former chairman of the Defense Policy Board at the Pentagon. And it's interesting that he had a nickname titled "the prince of darkness" . . . Now, the thinking of these neoconservatives is written of in scripture. In the book of Revelations 2 and 9 it reads, "'I know the blasphemy of those who say they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan.'"

As Nyhan asks, which of these things is not like the other? It's bad enough for the Standard to engage in cheap religion-baiting like this. (Wilkerson hates the Jews! Not.) But this isn't even funny, for heaven's sake.

If they're going to carry this kind of water for Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, they need to do a better job.

--Nick Confessore

MEAN GIRLS. In April, when I read Dorothy Rabinowitz's scathing Wall Street Journal commentary on "the Jersey Girls" -- the 9/11 widows who took a leading role in pressuring Congress and the White House to form a 9/11 commission -- I got the distinct sense of a conservative writer trying desparately to regain the moral high ground on an issue, 9/11, that her side thought they owned. It was not a little strange, after all, that of the many public figures who spent the last two or so years making their opinions know about the attacks -- even campaigning on them, as the president has -- Rabinowitz found objectionable only the opinions of a group of women whose husbands had died in the attacks.

Now comes some rather hilarious news. It seems one of the widows, Kristin Breitweiser, submitted an op-ed to the Journal. One of the paper's editors sent it to Rabinowitz for some thoughts, and she responded -- to Breitweiser, accidently --thus:

total and complete - not to mention repetitive - nonsense from people given endless media access to repeat the very same stupid charges, suspicions, and the rest...

but this is just an opportunity for these absurd products of the zeitgeist - women clearly in the grip of the delusion that they know something, have some policy, and wisdom not given to the rest of us to know - to grab the spotlight. again. and repeat, again, the same tripe before a national audience.

My thoughts - we don't publish nonsensical contentions that offer no news, no insight - solely on the grounds that those who feel attacked get a chance to defend their views. For that we have the letters column.

Here's my question: When did the Journal op-ed page stop publishing nonsensical contentions that offer no news and no insight? Heck, without nonsensical contentions, there wouldn't be a Journal op-ed page.

--Nick Confessore

IRAQ DEFEATS SAUDI ARABIA! In soccer, at least. The latest small news from the one corner of Iraq not obssessed by the political mess:

In a stunning upset victory, the Iraq national football team defeated Saudi Arabia tonight 3 to1 to earn a trip to the 2004 Olympic Summer games in Athens. The victory marks the first time in Iraq’s history that its football team will compete in the Olympics. In addition to defeating Saudi Arabia, Iraq needed a draw in the final game between Kuwait and Oman to qualify. The game ended 0-0 sealing Iraq’s bid.

“This means Iraq is on the right path,” said Hawar Mulla Mohammed through tears moments after the game. He had scored the team’s go-ahead, and eventually winning, goal of the game. “Our entire country deserves this incredible win. When the bus pulled into the stadium tonight we refused to think of anything but winning and now we are headed to Athens,” concluded the soon to be Olympian.

Also "representing Iraq this summer in Athens will be Najah Salman Ali, a boxer in the 48kg weight class; Al’aa Hikmet, a sprinter in the women’s 100 meters and 200 meters competitions; Ali Abdul-Munim Mohammed, a weightlifter in the 56kg class; and Raad Abbas Rahseed, who will compete in men’s tae kwon do."

I forsee lots of summer feature stories datelined Athens on these folks. Sportswriters, get yer pencils ready.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

EMBRACING DEFEAT. Yesterday's David Brooks column further explores the logic of the early elections proposal his former boss at The Weekly Standard put forth last week:

That means the good Iraqis, the ones who support democracy, have to have a forum in which they can defy us. If the insurgents are the only anti-Americans, then there will always be a soft spot for them in the hearts of Iraqi patriots.

That forum is an election campaign. There would be significant risks involved in moving the Iraq elections up to this fall. Parties might use their militias to coerce votes. But Iraqis have to see their candidates and themselves standing up with speeches and ideas, not just with R.P.G.'s. The insurgency would come to look anti-democratic, which would be seen to be bad, not just anti-American, which is seen to be good.

If the Iraqis do campaign this fall, then at their rallies they will jeer at us. We will still be hated around the world. But we will have succeeded in doing what we set out to do.

This plan has one very large merit -- it would get us out of Iraq without us needing to surrender. Instead, someone will win the election and say, "Please leave," and we'll say, "glad to have helped you put together this nice democracy, we'll be gone in a week," and everyone gets to save face. One should be under no illusions, however, that "we will have succeeded in doing what we set out to do" by any reasonable standard.

A democracy that emerges this way is likely to be weak, unstable, and highly illiberal. Insofar as it works to transform Arab political culture at all (which is somewhat unlikely, since the Sunni-majority countries of the Arab world are unlikely to look at a Shiite theocracy as a model for the future), it will probably do so in a negative way. And we certainly won't be able to achieve this campaign's sub rosa strategic goals of creating a stable base for US military forces or a moderating influence on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Still, under the circumstances, this may be the best we can do, and it certainly wouldn't be the worst of all possible worlds.

One major problem, though, is that actually organizing elections is likely to be a very difficult task. Earlier this afternoon I was in on a Center for American Progress conference call with former Clinton National Security Advisor Tony Lake who said that 200,000 troops would be a "modest" estimate of what would be required to impose enough law and order to put elections through safely. And that's assuming we don't beef up the level of forces dedicated to securing Iraq's highly porous borders. More troops are going to be needed to achieve any sort of stable outcome, so I don't think this is a decisive consideration against early elections, but it should serve as a warning that this is no silver bullet.

--Matthew Yglesias

BAD STRATEGY? I'm not sure it's such a good idea for Senate Democrats to be blasting a $5 million appropriation for demobilized Iraqi soldiers. They're correct, of course, that it's unconscionable for the Bush administration to not also push to extend unemployment benefits. (To do so would, alas, might make people there's a downturn going on here or something.) And it makes for a good juxtaposition and, thus, good P.R. But I actually wish we were proposing to spend much more than a paltry $5 million to subsidize unemployed Iraqi soldiers. Just because the Bush administration is bad to American workers doesn't mean we should block what is otherwise smart policy, especially when the two aren't connected in any manner save the rhetorical.

By contrast, I'm glad that John Kerry and other Democrats tried to block President Bush's original Iraq supplemental appropriation and substitute it for one that paid for the Iraq war by repealing some of the tax cuts. (I just wish the mainstream press weren't so easily spun to believe that doing so, failing, and then voting for the eventual appropriation constitutes hypocrisy.) Both policies were the right thing to do and the pairing was justified: You're supposed to raise taxes to pay for a major war. Indeed, the Bush administration may be the only one in American history not to.

--Nick Confessore

THE NEW MORAL EQUIVALENCY. In a sign of how desparate our situation has become in Iraq, the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto writes:

Who'll Apologize for This?
"Al Qaeda's leader in Iraq beheaded an American civilian and vowed more killings in revenge for the abuse of Iraqi prisoners," Reuters reports:

A poor quality videotape on the site showed a man dressed in orange overalls sitting bound on a white plastic chair in a bare room, then on the floor with five masked men behind him.

"My name is Nick Berg, my father's name is Michael. . . . I have a brother and sister, David and Sarah," said the bound man, adding he was from Philadelphia.

After one of the masked men read out a statement, they pushed Berg to the floor and shouted "God is greatest" above his screams as one of them sawed his head off with a large knife then held it aloft for the camera.

It's a grotesque and timely reminder of who our real enemies are. Ted Kennedy, take note.

How pathetic. Leave aside the gratuitous swipe at Kennedy; Taranto makes me wonder if blind stupidity should rank among the most dangerous of our real enemies. Does Taranto really believe that we should hold American soldiers to the same moral standards as terrorists -- that this is the best we can do? That we can win the war on terror without showing and proving to those who are suspicious of our power that we are a force for good in the world? That so long as no one apologizes for the hideous murder of Nick Berg, Americans need not feel remorse for the torture or ill-treament of Iraqis who, if U.S. officers who spoke to the Red Cross are to be believed, probably should not have been in Abu Ghraib in the first place? Isn't this what conservatives used to call "defining deviancy down?"

As Republican senator Lindsey Graham -- an actual grown-up who understands the damage those images do to our nation and our men and women in uniform -- said on CNN last night, "When you are the good guys, you've got to act like the good guys." I believe that we are, or at our worst at least aspire to be, the good guys. Does Taranto?

Tim Noah has more examples of such conservative sophistry here.

--Nick Confessore

NO ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL LEFT BEHIND. Via Patrick Nielsen Hayden, here's a very strange story from CBS news:

They are safety engineers at nuclear power plants and biological weapons experts. They work at NATO headquarters, at the Pentagon and at nearly every other federal agency. And, as CBS News Correspondent Vince Gonzales reports, they're employees with degrees from phony schools.

"These degrees aren't worth the paper that they're printed on," says one insider, who asked CBS News to protect his identity.

The man worked at a so-called diploma mill where students pay a lot of money to get a degree online or through the mail for little or no work.

He says he's not surprised to know that there are people working at almost every level of government who have degrees from these types of operations.

Assistant Secretary of Defense Charles Abell has a master's from Columbus University, a diploma mill Louisiana shut down. Deputy Assistant Secretary Patricia Walker lists among her degrees, a bachelor's from Pacific Western, a diploma mill banned in Oregon and under investigation in Hawaii.

CBS News requested interviews with both officials. The Pentagon turned us down, saying, "We don't consider it an issue."

Leaving aside the question of competence, this seems to raise a fairly basic issue of honesty. Of course, if this administration is going to start making dishonesty a disqualifying factor for office they're going to wind up needing to fire an awful lot of people. Still, you might think the president would find it a bit troubling that the man in charge of our personnel and readiness issues in the military doesn't hold a real degree in, as his biography states, "Human Resource Management."

--Matthew Yglesias

RUMSFELD MUST GO, DAY 6. The number of media outlets calling for Donald Rumsfeld to leave his post has mushroomed in recent days, including some of the leading papers in battleground states.

Jim Jordan and colleagues at the Thunder Road Group, who send out regular e-mail updates for America Coming Together that are every bit as pleasantly vicious as the Center for American Progress's Progress Report, though with little of the editorializing, have pulled together a nice list of the regional papers calling for Rumsfeld's head:

Kansas City Star, May 10:

“Washington must prove to the world it is serious about reclaiming the moral high ground and holding accountable those who were responsible for this debacle. This requires the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld… a new defense chief is needed to deal with the world's anger.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 9:

“Last week, we called upon Rumsfeld to resign for a series of costly miscalculations: exaggerating the Iraqi threat before the war, underestimating the cost of the war, mishandling the occupation and botching the prison abuse investigation. Rumsfeld rejects all of those as reasons to resign.

“But Rumsfeld said he would leave if he is no longer effective. American citizens and soldiers need a defense secretary who can concentrate on the volatile situation in Iraq and on protecting our troops, not one engulfed in scandal and focused on protecting his own hide.

Army Times, May 10:

“Around the halls of the Pentagon, a term of caustic derision has emerged for the enlisted soldiers at the heart of the furor over the Abu Ghraib prison scandal: the six morons who lost the war…

“But the folks in the Pentagon are talking about the wrong morons. There is no excuse for the behavior displayed by soldiers… but while responsibility begins with the six soldiers facing criminal charges, it extends all the way up the chain of command to the highest reaches of the military hierarchy and its civilian leadership…

“Accountability here is essential — even if that means relieving top leaders from duty in a time of war.

Philadelphia Inquirer, May 9:

“Donald Rumsfeld should resign as U.S. secretary of defense. If he lacks the decency and courage to do so, President Bush should fire him…

“He has to go. When you say you stand for a sacred principle such as human rights, you must stand for it. You can't treat it as an option to be discarded when inconvenient.

“He must go. If President Bush can't see that, then he must not grasp the risks that events in Iraq now pose to America's security and moral standing.”

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, May 7:

“If President Bush really wants to clean this stain off America, never mind his administration, he needs to fire Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld”

Toledo Blade, May 7:

“Donald Rumsfeld owes it to President Bush to fall on his sword and resign”

Minneapolis Star Tribune, May 7:

“Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, should resign immediately. If they do not, they should be fired...”

Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 7:

“It is time for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to prepare the final document of a long and sometimes illustrious public career: his letter of resignation…”

Arizona Daily Star, May 7:

“If Rumsfeld were sincere in serving the president, he would resign...”

Des Moines Register, May 7:

“His resignation would be appropriate, but it would leave unanswered the question of whether some responsibility extends even higher up. Rumsfeld, after all, has always acted with the full confidence and complete agreement of President Bush. But presidents don't resign over such things -- they do damage control instead.”

The Kerry campaign, for its part, is holding a petition drive calling for Rumsfeld's ouster. So far, more than 320,000 people have signed it, according the the Kerry campaign.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

MORE CHALABI! MORE! In a sense, one can add David Frum to the growing ranks of disgruntlement regarding Bush's Iraq policy. The content of his disgruntlement, however, is completely ridiculous:

Abu Ghraib is interpreted by some as evidence that Donald Rumsfeld's original strategy--go in fast, go in light--was wrong; that it would have been better to go in with closer to 400,000 troops or something like it, as some generals argued beforehand. That strikes me as perverse. Isn't the truer lesson of Abu Ghraib that Rumsfeld was right--and that we should have stuck to his original plan to let Iraqis keep order in their own country? Those of us who championed Ahmed Chalabi did so not because we thought of him as an unflawed character, but because we thought that the Iraqi National Congress was the group most capable of rapidly recruiting and deploying an effective and decent Iraqi indigenous force. Many people have ridiculed that concept – but I notice that the ridiculers are now proposing to do just the same thing, only using former Republican Guard generals rather than Iraqi democrats. Bad choice.

I'm glad to hear Frum concede that Chalabi is not an "unflawed character" but why, exactly, would they think the Iraqi National Congress was "the group most capable of rapidly recruiting and deploying an effective and decent Iraqi indigenous force?" Would that be due to Chalabi's decades-long absence from the country depriving him of any network of indigenous contacts, or was his massive unpopularity among his fellow Iraqis supposed to make this work?

And Frum betrays himself. What's doing all the work in this argument is that Chalabi's hypothetical force is said to be "decent" and composed of "Iraqi democrats." In other words, it all comes down to Chalabi's merits as a person after all. But based on what is he said to have these merits? Leave aside his early history of bank fraud and consider simply his record of unapologetically providing the United States with inaccurate intelligence information designed to further his own agenda. Or maybe we should be more worried about how he was highly sympathetic to Israel when he wanted the support of pro-Israel American politicians, but now leans toward Iran. Or the fact that he started out as a secularist when he needed to play to a domestic US audience and has been trying to cozy up to Ayatollah Sistani ever since he hit the ground and realized that Islamist Shiite politics would play better. This is all to say nothing of allegations that he's betrayed American intelligence secrets at various times, for various reasons.

There is, in short, no reason to believe that Chalabi is the sort of person we would want to see leading Iraq, and there certainly isn't any reason to think he's the sort of person who could have commanded the requisite broad popular support. Indeed, despite Frum's disappointment at our failure to simply hand the keys over to him, the Defense Department has repeatedly gone out of its way to support Chalabi -- we've given him money, flown his militia into the country, appointed his allies to key positions, given him access to Iraqi secret police files, etc. -- and even with all that he hasn't been able to build any popular support.

But as long as Frum's willing to admit that Bush's poor decision-making is responsible for much of the trouble we're having, I guess I'm glad to see him speaking up.

--Matthew Yglesias

TOO KIND. I have a great deal of respect for Michael O'Hanlon's opinion on these matters, but he's far too kind to Donald Rumsfeld in his recent assessment of his work:

As a result of these overall strengths, Rumsfeld has gotten some good things done in his three-and-a-quarter years on the job. Among his most impressive accomplishments was the war plan for Afghanistan. There were mistakes made, including letting Osama bin Laden escape and failing to properly stabilize the country. But the battle plan for overthrowing the Taliban was clever and effective.

Another success was his support for the Army's impressive restructuring efforts, which have received Bush administration blessing despite the personal disagreements between Rumsfeld and former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki. Rumsfeld is now leading the completion of a bold new plan for rethinking how American forces are based and operated overseas. . . .

As John Kerry rightly argues, Rumsfeld's biggest mistake was ignoring widespread advice to prepare for a difficult and chaotic environment once Hussein was overthrown.

These strengths are so intimately connected to Rumsfeld's basic weaknesses that it's a bit hard to seriously call them "strengths." The pattern you see here is that Rumsfeld wants a smaller, lighter, sleeker, faster military force that's more reliant on speed, air power, and special forces. On one level, that's absolutely right -- 21st century America doesn't need a military designed to halt a massive Soviet tank assault. On another level, notably, the "smaller" point, it's totally wrong.

The failure to secure the peace in Afghanistan or "prepare for a difficult and chaotic environment" in Iraq weren't some kind of oversights, but rather logical consequences of Rumsfeld's vision, which is long on striking power and short on boots on the ground. Since we really could use a lighter, faster attacking force, one might say that the Rumsfeldian glass is half full. Realistically, though, some things (preventative war in the Middle East, say) aren't worth doing at all if you aren't going to do them right. America had a capabilities problem in the postwar stabilization area before Rumsfeld ever came on the scene, but he's elevated an inability to handle these missions into a point of principle and made the situation that much worse.

Rep. Jim Turner and the minority staff on the House Homeland Security committee put together several worthwhile recommendations on improving the situation. Nevertheless, this is the kind of thing that requires presidential leadership. Maybe with a different Secretary of Defense we'd get it.

--Matthew Yglesias

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK. I'm just imagining how I would feel if were a resident of Crested Butte, Col., and found out that my government had just sold off my favorite hiking trails to a multinational mining firm for a minuscule fraction of the land's market value. I'd be pretty ticked off.

This transaction was by the books, it turns out. But as Michael Kinsley likes to say, the scandal isn't what's illegal -- it's what's legal.

--Nick Confessore

AS GOES GEORGE WILL... If you haven't seen it yet, George Will's column on the Abu Ghraib scandal is worth reading, as are various posts on Andrew Sullivan's site.

I'm going to try not to fall into the trap of praising the heretofore unremarked wisdom of someone with whom I usually disagree just because I agree with him today. And I think Will is still overly kind to Don Rumsfeld. But he makes a point which other conservatives would do well to heed and apply to their allies in the Bush administration:

The first axiom is: When there is no penalty for failure, failures proliferate. Leave aside the question of who or what failed before Sept. 11, 2001. But who lost his or her job because the president's 2003 State of the Union address gave currency to a fraud -- the story of Iraq's attempting to buy uranium in Niger? Or because the primary and only sufficient reason for waging preemptive war -- weapons of mass destruction -- was largely spurious? Or because postwar planning, from failure to anticipate the initial looting to today's insufficient force levels, has been botched? Failures are multiplying because of choices for which no one seems accountable.

Not for Will the lazy excuse that we must look to the future, not the past. Kudos to him. I can't say the same for many of the administration's other defenders.

--Nick Confessore

A WORLD OF PRISONS. One argument I've heard (notably by Jonah Goldberg last night on CNN) is that the media shouldn't have been so eager to show these photos out of Abu Ghraib. After all, the argument goes, their inflammatory nature harms the national interest, and the Army was already investigating the situation. Jonah asked "would releasing the pictures stop abuse that is actually going on at the moment?" and replied that "there is no evidence that I have seen that that is the case." Today's Washington Post gives us some good reasons to be skeptical of this:

The Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where a unit of U.S. soldiers abused prisoners, is just the largest and suddenly most notorious in a worldwide constellation of detention centers -- many of them secret and all off-limits to public scrutiny -- that the U.S. military and CIA have operated in the name of counterterrorism or counterinsurgency operations since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

These prisons and jails are sometimes as small as shipping containers and as large as the sprawling Guantanamo Bay complex in Cuba. They are part of an elaborate CIA and military infrastructure whose purpose is to hold suspected terrorists or insurgents for interrogation and safekeeping while avoiding U.S. or international court systems, where proceedings and evidence against the accused would be aired in public. Some are even held by foreign governments at the informal request of the United States.

"The number of people who have been detained in the Arab world for the sake of America is much more than in Guantanamo Bay. Really, thousands," said Najeeb Nuaimi, a former justice minister of Qatar who is representing the families of dozens of prisoners.

Now do I know for sure that people are being mistreaded elsewhere as badly as they were at Abu Ghraib? Obviously not. Do I know that there's any mistreatment at all? Well, I can't be sure, but there have been many credible reports over the years that some degree of torture is being used in at least some of these facilities (especially in cases where prisoners are being held by foreign governments at American request), and the reality is that we really don't know what's going on because no one's allowed to find out. Not only are these facilities off-limits to public scrutiny, but they seem to be off-limits to any form of the checks and balances on which the American system is based.

Now if you're just filled with a boundless level of trust in the people currently running the executive branch, maybe you don't care about this. Nothing I've seen of their conduct indicates to me that they deserve that kind of faith. What's more, it would be wrong to put that kind of faith in anyone.

As I said, these stories have been floating around for a while now. Ideally, then, the photos might not be a really important part of the story. In the real world, though, pictures are different -- Don Rumsfeld himself alluded to the fact that it's not until you see the photos that the gravity of the situation fully comes home -- and if releasing these images is what it takes to spur the Congress and the public to exhibit some more curiosity about what's going on here, then that'll have been worth it. Am I sure enhanced public and congressional (and, where appropriate, judicial) scrutiny will reveal more ongoing cases of abuse? No, I'm not, but I wouldn't bet against it.

--Matthew Yglesias

DREAMING OF JOHN MCCAIN. The increasingly disgruntled Andrew Sullivan is now pushing the idea that John Kerry should pick John McCain has his vice presidential nominee. The idea that McCain should become a Democrat and save the country from George W. Bush is, of course, something that's been bouncing around liberalish circles for quite some time now.

The idea suffers from two big problems. One is that McCain keeps saying he doesn't want to do it. The other is that Democrats, much as they may prefer McCain to the rest of what the GOP has an offer, don't really like him all that much -- he is quite conservative on a wide range of issues.

My sense, though, is that the first problem would be surmountable if Kerry and the rest of the party really wanted it to be. Either way, I'm not going to be able to change his mind. On the other issue, I think this is something liberals should at least think seriously about. I can't count the number of times I've heard someone or other express the view that defeating Bush is of such overwhelming importance that they want to see whatever done that could achieve that goal. Primary voters consistently told exit pollsters that electability was the main criterion by which they were trying to pick the Democratic nominee. I think it's very hard to see how a Kerry-McCain ticket could wind up losing. Ralph Nader's support would go up somewhat, of course, but at the same time Bush would lose the only issue that really works for him -- the lingering sense that Democrats simply can't be trusted with national security.

What's more, how conservative McCain looks really depends on what you think the big issues are. The big domestic policy fight of any Kerry administration is bound to wind up centering around the question of rolling back the Bush tax cuts. McCain -- unlike many congressional Democrats, including people like Evan Bayh who one hears mentioned as VP possibilities -- was against them. On the question of the war, McCain doesn't hold the left's favored position of getting out ASAP, but neither does Kerry, so this doesn't amount to much of an objection to McCain. Under the circumstances, I think it's worth serious consideration.

--Matthew Yglesias

COMMUNION WATCH. Via Atrios, here's the campaign press's latest installment of "Who's a good Catholic?" John Kerry's habit of taking communion is once again contrasted with his habit of supporting reproductive freedoms. Pro-choice Catholic Republicans, including Rudy Giuliani, George Pataki, and Tom Ridge, are once again ignored. Granted, they're not running for president. But still.

Here's a tip, guys. He does this every Sunday.

--Nick Confessore

A WOMAN'S TOUCH? With all due respect to the folks at Salon, this article about the Abu Ghraib scandal is very weird. "Female soldiers were supposed to be a civilizing influence on the military," reads the article's subhed. "Then came Abu Ghraib." The author of the piece, Cathy Hong, writes "When the subject of women in combat was a hot topic in the 1980s, proponents argued that female soldiers would humanize the hypermasculinized machinations of the military -- perhaps even help prevent scandals like Abu Ghraib from happening. But the terrifying reports from the past week have thrown a major wrench into that theory."

What theory? I'm not an expert on women in the military, but I've followed the issue fairly closely, and I don't know of any "proponents" who argued that allowing more women in the armed forces would "humanize" them. Indeed, that's the argument chiefly made by people who were against integrating women into the military, whose whole case rests on assertions that womens' presence will undermine the combat capability of our armed forces. (This excellent Washington Monthly article by Phil Carter explains some of the reasons why this is not quite true.) The point is, militaries aren't supposed to be humanized. They're supposed to be good at winning wars. The mistreatment at Abu Ghraib was not the consequence of a lack of niceness on the part of the American soldiers, who are perfectly capable of being deadly fighters while refraining from the torture of prisoners. Rather, all the evidence indicates that the scandal is a product of poor leadership and, as one result, total failure of discipline. Indeed, Hong amasses very little evidence for any alternative explanation.

"How could a woman do this?" she writes. Simple: Out of the same mixture of fear, loathing, and poor discipline that the men in the prison unit did. Why should that be a mystery?

--Nick Confessore

A FEW BAD APPLES. Just about everyone on the right seems to be sticking to the storyline that the abuses at Abu Ghraib were just the work of a small handful of out-of-control soldiers. It's a comforting story, but it's just not true:

A senior Red Cross official added: "We were dealing here with a broad pattern, not individual acts. There was a pattern and a system."

"ICRC (Red Cross) delegates directly witnessed and documented a variety of methods used to secure the cooperation of the persons deprived of their liberty with their interrogators," according to the confidential report. The 24-page document was confirmed as authentic by the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) after it was published today by the Wall Street Journal.

The Red Cross report says its delegates saw how detainees at Abu Ghraib were kept "completely naked in totally empty concrete cells and in total darkness." It said it found evidence supporting prisoners' allegations of other forms of abuse during arrest, initial detention and interrogation.

It's quite possible (likely even) that the handful of soldiers we've seen charged somehow went beyond what they were supposed to be doing, but their actions fairly clearly took place amidst a broader context of mistreating prisoners. And as this excellent report from The Washington Post makes clear, the mistreatment was not some kind of accident, but a deliberate policy choice:

Less than two weeks after 1,000 pounds of explosives demolished U.N. headquarters here on Aug. 19, driving the organization from Iraq, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller arrived in Baghdad from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he was warden of the U.S. detention facility for suspected terrorists. Miller's mission in Iraq signaled new zeal to organize an intelligence network that could hit back at the insurgents, but through unorthodox means. . . .

U.S. officials were under mounting pressure to collect wartime intelligence but were hobbled by a shortage of troops, the failure to build an effective informant network and a surprisingly skilled insurgency. In response, they turned to the prison system. Today, as outrage spreads over images of abused prisoners, the practices inside the prisons have the potential of strengthening the insurgency that they were designed to defeat.

There are some more articles with somewhat similar content to be found elsewhere. Spencer Ackerman's talking about a slightly different aspect of Iraq when he writes that it's "a signpost on the road to failure when military tactics diverge from the strategic objectives they're supposed to advance," but it applies here, too. The idea that we could somehow torture (or "coercively interrogate" or whatever you want to call it) our way to a stable, democratic Iraq would have been obviously wrong to anyone who knew what they were doing.

What's worse, this is hardly the only detention facility the United States is operating around the world. The same General Miller who seems to have advocated harsher measures for Abu Ghraib had been previously running the facility at Guantanamo Bay. Don Rumsfeld now tells us that, unlike the prisoners at Gitmo, the detainees in Abu Ghraib were considered to have Geneva Convention rights. Who knows what's been going with the class of prisoners that the military feels should be treated even worse?

--Matthew Yglesias

WEEKEND UPDATE. Having trouble coming up with that perfect torture joke? Here's what you missed:

The Columnists

• David Brooks. No more coalitions of the willing for me.
• Nicholas Kristof. The increasing popularity of nail polish in Iran is obviously this week's crucial news story.
• George Will. It's a good thing I live in "soft America" so I don't get punished for making factual errors in my columns.
• Jim Hoagland. Americans are too weak and impatient to understand the vital need for world domination.
• Thomas Friedman. The biggest Arab states are cursed by oil, except for Egypt which is actually the biggest of them all and so I'm just going to ignore it.
• David Broder. Even oil lobbyists "leaders in an industry strongly supportive of the administration's regulatory and environmental policies" think Rumsfeld's lost it.
• Maureen Dowd. Somehow, only the people who were right wind up getting fired in this administration.

The Op-Ed You Actually Need to Read

• Neal Baer and Noah Wyle on the crisis in America's ERs.

--Matthew Yglesias

THROW YOUR VOTE AWAY, REDUX. Many readers responded to my call for explanations of the difficulties of using paper receipts for electronic voting machines. Many also pointed out that the story I cited yesterday mentioned a 37-inch ballot, not a 37-page ballot, as I had misread. That's a lot smaller, and perhaps a necessary length given California's many referendums. Still, as reader K.L. points out:

I'm sitting here looking at a WalMart Receipt that has about 100 grocery items listed on it by name, barcode number, price and quantity. It also has a time stamp, my credit card number with the first digits x'd out and the clerk's name and register number. It's about 15" long by 2.5 inches wide.

The cash register that produced this receipt is operated 24 hours/day for 365 days/year and there is usually a line of people waiting at the checkout line. It takes a minimum wage grocery clerk about 4 seconds to pop in a new roll of paper when it runs out. The information on this receipt exceeds that which would be required for any election that I have ever heard of. And the volume of receipts printed out by any store far exceeds the volume produced by any voting machine. Think about it. The average clerk probably scans grocery items 100-times faster than the average person votes, and people pass through the cashier line a lot faster than any voting booth. In fact the new self-service checkout lines at the grocery store produce receipts that are already pre-cut and ready for you to grab. So industry can obviously design a recipt printing machine that is self-service and user-friendly.

Don't let anyone tell you that it is too costly, complicated or difficult to print out voting receipts. The printer technology is used in every store in the developed world. As far as the 37 page [sic] nonsense. They don't need to print the entire voter's guide on the reciept, or even the entire ballot with all the candidates that you DIDN'T vote for. All that is necessary is a short abbreviation of the ballot line (Pres, Sen, Bal. Meas. 15, etc) and your actual vote (candidates name or yes/no in the case of ballot measures). That information can easily be fit onto a cash register recipt.

Sounds right to me, although one reader says they think California law might require that no abbreviations be used.

Reader J.A. argues for the other side:

In addition, paper is both a hassle and an extra expense. Printers break and jam, too--that's a too-common occurrence. Mechanical devices are harder to engineer for high availability than electronic devices. Printers have to be maintained and fed. Paper is also harder, in many ways, to secure.

One other thing: I don't believe anyone is advocating a system which allows the voter to take home a copy of her ballot. That leads directly to vote-buying. Some systems do issue an encrypted receipt which can be used to verify a ballot, but which cannot itself reproduce the contents of that ballot.

The second point makes sense, and apparently this is received wisdom in the voting-technology community, so I'll take it. But I still can't believe it's impossible to develop machines that print out a verifiable paper trail for use by election officials, and that prints out in Spanish, English, and whatever other language folks want to use. We put a man on the moon, for heaven's sake. Surely we can do this.

--Nick Confessore

PICK A SIDE. I don't really agree with Robert Wright's proposed quasi-partition plan for Iraq, but near the end he makes some very good points with wider applicability:

One big obstacle to implementing this plan is the mindset of the Bush White House. Administration officials would have to accept a reality they never quite acknowledged before the war: that a democratic and truly sovereign Iraq may do things the United States doesn't like. In particular, they would have to let go of a primary, if rarely articulated, motivation for the war: to use Iraq as a platform from which to project American military power.

From the beginning, this goal was essentially incompatible with the professed goal of democratizing Iraq. A democratic and sovereign Iraq was never likely to let American troops use its soil to intimidate its various neighbors. How President Bush and his advisers mentally reconciled the idealistic and realpolitik rationales for this war is a question for future psycho-historians to answer. In any event, the contradiction is now manifest, and we don't even have the luxury of choosing between the two scenarios—between a democratic but unwieldy Iraq and a non-democratic but strategically valuable Iraq. Only a stable Iraq would be useful as a strategic platform, and an Iraq being used as a strategic platform is unlikely ever to be stable.

Let me quote once again Shibley Telhami's very sharp observation on the subject:

We say we want democracy. I believe we mean it. I think we want democracy. I think our political elite wants democracy. I think even our leaders want democracy. But they want a lot of other things even more, and that's the problem that we have in Iraq.

That's quite right. And the thing of it is that each time we've tried to manipulate the situation to produce a democracy that miraculously will do whatever the Bush administration wants (the caucus fiasco, various Chalabi-related hijinks) we've dug ourselves into a deeper hole. Conversely, when we've used our power in ways that are complementary to the goals of legitimate leaders (as in Kurdistan and in our recent approach to the situation in Najaf), we've been reasonably successful.

Any way out of the current mess is going to require much more reliance on the cooperative model, which means accepting that the regime that emerges may or may not act in accordance with our strategic goals in the short-term. That's not ideal, but the alternative is a guarantee of catastrophe.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE MEASURE OF A MAN. A Republican friend of mine who strongly supports President Bush sent me this story. It's a short piece about Bush's campaign-trail encounter with an Ohio girl who lost her mother in the 9/11 attacks, and how Bush stopped and comforted her:

In a moment largely unnoticed by the throngs of people in Lebanon waiting for autographs from the president of the United States, George W. Bush stopped to hold a teenager's head close to his heart.

Lynn Faulkner, his daughter, Ashley, and their neighbor, Linda Prince, eagerly waited to shake the president's hand Tuesday at the Golden Lamb Inn. He worked the line at a steady campaign pace, smiling, nodding and signing autographs until Prince spoke:

"This girl lost her mom in the World Trade Center on 9-11."

Bush stopped and turned back.

"He changed from being the leader of the free world to being a father, a husband and a man," Faulkner said. "He looked right at her and said, 'How are you doing?' He reached out with his hand and pulled her into his chest."

Faulkner snapped one frame with his camera.

"I could hear her say, 'I'm OK,' " he said. "That's more emotion than she has shown in 21/2 years. Then he said, 'I can see you have a father who loves you very much.' "

"And I said, 'I do, Mr. President, but I miss her mother every day.' It was a special moment."

My friend, who I respect a great deal, asked me "What is your reaction when you read a story like this?" And I told him, in all honesty: My gut reaction was the president is a hypocrite.

This sounds harsh and predictably partisan, so allow me to explain. I think Bush's gesture was a kind one, as well as good politics, though no doubt sincere. But it also cost Bush nothing. A better test of character is when you do the right thing even when it costs you something or requires a sacrifice on your part. Bush faced this test when the families of the 9/11 victims asked him to approve an independent commission to investigate the attacks, plumb the factors that allowed the terrorists to succeed, and recommend reforms to make future attacks less likely. What did Bush do? Confronted with a choice between doing right by the 9/11 families, and trying to ward off an investigation which might potentially cause him political problems down the road, he chose the latter. In this story, my friend Brian Montopoli documented various efforts by the administration to stymie, delay, defund, and otherwise make difficult the creation of the 9/11 commission, and, having failed that, to obstruct its ability to function properly. That the administration was not successful in the end is, I think, illustration enough of how in the wrong they were to begin with.

Bush wants to be, as he says time and self-aggrandizing time again, a "war president." Regrettably, he wants only the benefits -- high poll ratings and unquestioning support -- of the job and none of the sacrifices, among them putting aside your preferred political agenda to enact policies that will win the war without leaving behind a mess for the American people to clean up down the road. This is quite in the same vein as Bush campaigning on 9/11 and taking photo ops with little girls in swing states, but not wanting to take a hit for the mistakes his administration makes leading up to 9/11.

--Nick Confessore

ROOT CAUSES. Linda Chavez of the Center for Equal Opportunity really gets to the bottom of this torture business:

It is hard to know what led to this breakdown in discipline. But one factor that may have contributed -- but which I doubt investigators will want to even consider -- is whether the presence of women in the unit actually encouraged more misbehavior, especially of the sexual nature that the pictures reveal.

Now here I was thinking that when you combine an understaffed, undertrained guard force with an official national policy that detainees have no rights under the Geneva Convention and throw some overzealous military intelligence guys and private contractors into the mix, this is the sort of thing you get. Clearly, I was way off the wrong track here. Letting women into the Army did it!

After all, as Chavez writes, "Last year, one female Marine actually gave birth on a warship deployed off Kuwait." You know how it goes, one day you're giving birth, the next day you're "breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees" and "beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair." It's a slippery slope. Plus, as we know this sort of thing never used to happen back in the day.

Elsewhere on Town Hall, Jonah Goldberg blames CBS for creating this mess. The Economist has other, better ideas.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE TERRORISM ISSUE. One very interesting development in the latest Gallup Poll (via Ruy Teixeira) is that the president's approval rating on the terrorism issue is finally (and deservedly) coming down to earth:

Bush has placed a great deal of emphasis on his being a "war president," fighting the global threat of terrorism. Job approval in this area has been one of Bush's major strengths. The latest poll, however, finds a substantial drop in the public's approval of how Bush is handling terrorism, and it is now at the low point in his administration. Barely a majority of Americans, 52%, approve of the way he is dealing with the terrorist threat, while 45% disapprove. In mid-April, Bush's approval rating in this area was eight points higher, at 60%. It was in the mid-80% range from November 2001 through May 2002, but did not drop below 60% until March 2004.

My advice to the Kerry campaign would be to keep hitting on this. Public impressions of the economy and Iraq are more or less out of the hands of the candidates and in the hands of objective reality. The state of America's efforts against terrorism, on the other hand, are very hard to assess unless you either go out of your way to seek information or else someone crams it down your throat. Counting on the former strategy would be a mistake. One huge X-factor in this campaign is what happens if there's an attack between today and election day. Initially, the public is likely to rally around the president, but will that halo last, or will people decide to hold the commander-in-chief accountable for his failure to address major ongoing shortcomings on the homeland security, intelligence, and public diplomacy fronts? I can't say, but if I were running for president, I'd be trying my hardest to make sure people choose what's behind door number two.

The horse race numbers are not without interest either. Kerry's either narrowly ahead nationwide or else they're tied, depending on how you count the Nader vote. Looking at the regional breakdowns, though, Bush is stronger in the red states than Kerry is in the blue states, while Kerry has a four point lead (even with Nader drawing 5 percent -- better than he does in the red or the blue areas and almost certain to drop) in the so-called "purple states." That seems to confirm Thomas Schaller's notion that Bush has been boosting his appeal in all the wrong places.

--Matthew Yglesias

RUMSFELD MUST GO, DAY 2. So says the New York Times editorial board:

There was a moment about a year ago, in the days of "Mission Accomplished," when Donald Rumsfeld looked like a brilliant tactician. American troops — the lean, mean fighting machine Mr. Rumsfeld assembled — swept into Baghdad with a speed that surprised even the most optimistic hawks. It was crystal clear that the Defense Department, not State and certainly not the United Nations, would control the start of nation-building. Mr. Rumsfeld, with his steely grin and tell-it-like-it-is press conferences, was the closest thing to a rock star the Bush cabinet would ever see.

That was then.

It is time now for Mr. Rumsfeld to go, and not only because he bears personal responsibility for the scandal of Abu Ghraib. That would certainly have been enough. The United States has been humiliated to a point where government officials could not release this year's international human rights report this week for fear of being scoffed at by the rest of the world. The reputation of its brave soldiers has been tarred, and the job of its diplomats made immeasurably harder because members of the American military tortured and humiliated Arab prisoners in ways guaranteed to inflame Muslim hearts everywhere. And this abuse was not an isolated event, as we know now and as Mr. Rumsfeld should have known, given the flood of complaints and reports directed to his office over the last year.

The world is waiting now for a sign that President Bush understands the seriousness of what has happened. It needs to be more than his repeated statements that he is sorry the rest of the world does not "understand the true nature and heart of America." Mr. Bush should start showing the state of his own heart by demanding the resignation of his secretary of defense.

Peter Beinart of The New Republic agrees:

Americans remain divided about the war in Iraq. And they remain divided about President Bush. But surely people of goodwill from both sides of the great red-blue, hawk-dove divide can put aside their differences and agree on at least one thing: Donald Rumsfeld needs a new job.

 

Others calling for Rumsfeld's resignation include: House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry.

Bush has said he'll stand by his man. But that's just his opening position, entirely to be expected. He wasn't going to allow for a 9-11 Commission, either, or let Condoleezza Rice testify there, or grant them much of his time himself. He was firm, adamant, and confident in every one of these public refusals. And he caved in each case because he had to. Because public opinion demanded no less.

The president is a stubborn man, slow to come to around to uncomfortable political realities. It took him an extra day even to apologize for the actions at Abu Ghraib, despite the agreement of his aides and advisors that such an apology would be necessary. He botched his first and best chance to try to reach out to the Arab world during his televisied appearances, then tracked back and did what he should have done already. Why the delay? Perhaps because public opinion only slowly trickles into the inner sanctum of the administration. Perhaps also because the president has a characterological reluctance to accede and react to unpleasant truths. In any event, Rumsfeld's testimony before the House and Senate today will be definitive. Rumsfeld, for his part, seems characterologically incapable of contrition, though his aides say he plans to apologize to Congress for not keeping them apprised of the investigations of Abu Ghraib.

Right now, Bush has to back Rumsfeld. Just as Rumsfeld is, by nature and training, incapable of a certain kind of direct, specific, and transparent communication, so Bush, by nature and training, stubbornly resists the dictates of public opinion. But if the wind blows long and hard against Rumsfeld, creating a threat to Bush's electoral prospects, precedent suggests Bush is likely to shift with it. The main question is how long it will take, and how much America's reputation in the world will suffer during the time it takes Bush to come around.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE. Iraq advice for Kerry and articles from our May issue.

Special to the Web:

• Kerry's Iraq Choices: Does John Kerry run the risk of being too consistent on Iraq? By Harold Meyerson.
• Baghdad Blues: George Bush's Iraq is a disaster, and Kerry should steer clear of it. By Robert Kuttner.
• Rocky Mountain High: Sure, Bush won Colorado last time. Come November, though, he better watch out. By Terence Samuel.
• 'Bell Curve' -- Levant Version: Wherein our intrepid correspondent unearths some fascinating right-wing research. By Tony Hendra.

From our May issue:

• Father Figured: A review of the new biography George Herbert Walker Bush. By David Greenberg.
• Future Retirees at Risk: Bush's "ownership society" would replace existing social-insurance systems with personal savings accounts. His approach threatens to make old age and poverty synoymous again. By Alicia H. Munnell.
• John on the Spot: Democrats are united against W. But are they united for Kerry? By Sarah Wildman.

ROCK THE (YOUTH) VOTE. My friend Damien Cave has an excellent piece in the new Rolling Stone about suppression of the college vote. The culprits? Local politicians, who don't want college students to have a say in local elections:

But in recent years, many election officials have been building a variety of hurdles to make it more difficult for students to register and vote. In May 2002, the city council in Saratoga Springs, New York, shut down a polling place at Skidmore College, forcing students to travel off-campus to vote. That same year, a judge in Arkansas tried to block 1,000 students at Ouachita Baptist University and Henderson State University from casting ballots, ruling that they must vote in their hometowns -- even though the deadline for absentee ballots had already passed. And when students from the University of New Hampshire showed up at the polls on Election Day that year, poll workers handed them a pamphlet warning them that voting locally could affect their financial aid and taxes. The scare tactic worked: Many students left without voting.

Refusing to register students is "a blatant form of disenfranchisement," says Jennifer Weiser, who advocates for young voters as associate counsel of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. "It's clearly illegal."

In some cases, election officials simply don't seem to understand the law. Jehmu Greene, president of Rock the Vote, was surprised by the response when her group called state election offices in Oregon and Washington about laws regarding student voting: "They were clueless about the issue," says Greene.

In many cases, however, there's more than ignorance at work. In small college towns, students often outnumber all other voters combined -- raising fears that they could determine the outcome of local elections. The colonial town of Williamsburg, Virginia, has only 6,000 registered voters -- and 7,600 students at the College of William and Mary. In January, when campus leaders began pushing students to register and vote, the city responded by requiring every student to fill out a two-page questionnaire detailing everything from their personal finances to where their car is registered. Of an estimated 150 students who completed questionnaires, only four have been registered. "They don't want students involved," says Rob Forrest, who quit school and moved off campus so he could run for a seat on the city council. "It's a cop-out to interpret the law like this -- and if the law says that we're not supposed to get involved, then the law is wrong."

It's pretty amazing. I remember this from my own college years, when local politicians tried to get students barred from voting in a major refendum that was coming up.

--Nick Confessore

DEPARTMENT OF FAULTY HEADLINES. This piece, by new Washington Post K Street reporter Jeffrey Birnbaum, is titled "Lobbyists Spread Campaign Cash: Bush, Kerry Have Benefited Since '97." Now, reading that headline, you'd think that the two candidates were equal beneficiaries of lobbyist money (which, in the scheme of things, is a drop in the bucket and barely worth an article in the first place). But it turns out they are not. Bush took in more than three times as much money from lobbyists as Kerry did, according to Birnbaum. Yet Birnbaum can still write:

The results are surprising given Kerry's criticism of Bush for being close to corporate lobbyists. Kerry has portrayed himself as less beholden than Bush to "special interests" and has proposed a stronger lobbying law.

Surprising to whom? Birnbaum? It seems to me his own evidence backs up Kerry's portrayal of himself as less beholden to "special interests." Even so, in cases of campaign finance reform, it's absurd -- but entirely typical of the narrowness of much reporting on this topic -- to attack as hypocrites those who are pushing for reform but benefitting from the status quo. Neither party nor any particular politician can afford to unilaterally disarm, as the saying goes. Better a party or politician pursue reform while taking advantage of what is legal today than not pursue the reform at all, right?

The broader problem with Birnbaum's piece is that he takes far too limited a view of the relationship between lobbyists and politicians, writing:

The study suggests, in other words, that roughly 9 percent of Bush's top fundraisers lobby the federal government on behalf of paying clients. Together those lobbyists have raised more than $6 million for Bush's reelection campaign, have represented more than 800 organizations and companies and have billed those clients $146 million for lobbying since 1997, the study says.

Campaign contributions from actual lobbyists are the least of it. Far more important is the degree to which lobbyists help steer the political cash of the business community to one side or the other, not merely through PACs, but through the large trade associations that, during elections, function as de facto campaign committees. And here, the Republican Party has -- as I sketched out in this piece -- done something quite extraordinary. They have the lobbyists working essentially for the party, ensuring that their clients' or boss' campaign cash and independent expenditures work in tandem with Republican strategic interests. The total value of that assistance is in the tens of millions of dollars, far exceeding the piddling hard-money donations that the Post is writing about here.

--Nick Confessore

THROWING YOUR VOTE AWAY? Reading this Washington Post story about the merits of paper receipts for electronic voting machines, one comes across L.A. County election chief Connie McCormack, who is adamantly against the use of such receipts:

Waving a 37-inch receipt that would be needed for each voter on a complicated ballot, Los Angeles election chief Conny B. McCormack said making voters pore over the cryptic printout with small type would guarantee confusion. "Touch screens have a proven track record of doing the best job," she said. "Voters are confident in these systems. There's only a tiny, vocal minority making false claims to the contrary."

California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, however, disputed McCormack's claim, saying he followed the unanimous recommendation of his policy panel when he decertified touch-screen equipment last week. "I would not base my decision on the false claims of a tiny minority," he said.

Congress is also considering several proposals, including one by Rep. Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.) that would mandate paper receipts for electronic machines in this fall's election. Holt appeared outside the hearing, joined by supporters from TrueMajority, Common Cause and TrueVoteMD, which are demanding the paper receipts, and said pressure from such grass-roots groups is giving momentum to reforms. Paper receipts, he said, "could be ready for this year's election."

I find this odd on two levels, and would invite emails from readers better-informed than I on these matters. One is, why is McCormack so opposed to the use of such receipts? (One possibility is suggested in the article: Latino groups, among others, believe electronic voting is easier on non-English speakers, and that the use of receipts would drive them away from the polls. What's the evidence on this?) The other is, what's up with the 37-page receipt? Why does it have to be so long?

I always assumed that the receipts would be, more or less, a printout of who you had voted for, resembling a ballot that had been punched, and perhaps with two copies -- one to the election board, and one to keep for yourself. Maybe they'd ask you to look at the printout and sign the one kept on record by the election authorities. I dunno. But why 37 pages? Who can help me out here?

--Nick Confessore

BEYOND SOCIAL SECURITY. Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan's mighty concerned about the fiscal outlook:

"Our fiscal prospects are, in my judgment, a significant obstacle to long-term stability because the budget deficit is not readily subject to correction by market forces that stabilize other imbalances," he said in remarks to a banking conference.

Greenspan noted that the federal deficit, estimated to climb above $500 billion this year, will amount to 4.25 percent of the total economy after being in surplus just a few years ago.

He said one of the biggest concerns was that the deficits now were occurring right before the first wave of baby boomers will begin retiring.

That's true enough, as far as it goes, but it seems to raise the question of why Greenspan was so enthusiastic about the tax cuts that created the deficits in the first place. The agenda, as usual, really has little to do with deficits and much to do with Social Security:

Greenspan did not offer a solution to the budget deficit in his speech Thursday although in the past he has called on Congress to move quickly to address the looming funding difficulties in Social Security by trimming the benefits of future retirees.

Two proposals he has suggested include raising the retirement age for receiving full Social Security benefits and reducing annual cost of living adjustments that Social Security recipients receive.

The merits of these proposals aside, it's important to understand that neither of them would do a great deal to cope with the problem. Right now federal spending is about 20 percent of GDP, slightly lower than the average of the 1970-2000 period. Federal revenue, meanwhile, is down to just 16.6 percent of GDP well below the already inadequate historical average. Social Security, if unchanged, will expand spending by about 2 percent of GDP over a period of decades. You could get Social Security growth down to zero percent of GDP, were you so inclined, with the Greenspan program of fairly drastic cuts.

That would still leave you with the entire present-day deficit. Meanwhile, over the next thirty years Medicare is set to expand from 2.2 percent of GDP to 6.6 percent. Except that number's based on the White House's now-debunked lowballing of the costs, so the real number is higher than that. That's a much bigger problem than Social Security, and because it's largely driven by increases in the cost of medical care (rather than increases in the number of old people) it can't be dealt with by simply "trimming" benefits. A program to provide people with health care needs to pay what health care costs -- 80 percent of a heart bypass doesn't do anyone any good.

What's more, over the next few years we're obviously going to wind up spending more on Iraq. There's also a consensus that we need a bigger Army, and it's well-known that we have a lot of unmet needs on the homeland security front. So a debate over the future of Social Security is welcome, but no one should fool themselves into thinking that this is the essence of the problem. On the one hand, taxes have been set way too low (with Greenspan's support), and on the other hand we've got a deeply dysfunctional health care system. Social Security is, relatively speaking, small potatoes.

--Matthew Yglesias

CHANGE THE POLICY. There are, frankly, so many reasons why it would be a good idea to fire Don Rumsfeld that I've got to hope the latest movement to get the job done has more success than previous efforts to see him canned over disastrous post-war planning and bad pre-war intelligence. Still, more important than the fate of the man is the fate of his policies. As The Washington Post editorializes:

Beginning more than two years ago, Mr. Rumsfeld decided to overturn decades of previous practice by the U.S. military in its handling of detainees in foreign countries. His Pentagon ruled that the United States would no longer be bound by the Geneva Conventions; that Army regulations on the interrogation of prisoners would not be observed; and that many detainees would be held incommunicado and without any independent mechanism of review. Abuses will take place in any prison system. But Mr. Rumsfeld's decisions helped create a lawless regime in which prisoners in both Iraq and Afghanistan have been humiliated, beaten, tortured and murdered -- and in which, until recently, no one has been held accountable.

The lawlessness began in January 2002 when Mr. Rumsfeld publicly declared that hundreds of people detained by U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan "do not have any rights" under the Geneva Conventions. That was not the case: At a minimum, all those arrested in the war zone were entitled under the conventions to a formal hearing to determine whether they were prisoners of war or unlawful combatants. No such hearings were held, but then Mr. Rumsfeld made clear that U.S. observance of the convention was now optional. Prisoners, he said, would be treated "for the most part" in "a manner that is reasonably consistent" with the conventions -- which, the secretary breezily suggested, was outdated.

This is really the issue here. Are we going to continue to keep large numbers of people in secret detention centers indefinitely, deny that they have any rights under domestic or international law, and prevent their cases from being reviewed by any sort of judicial apparatus -- and then just hope the people charged with guarding and interrogating them don't do anything beyond the pale?

I'm sure the sort of images we've been seeing out of Abu Ghraib aren't what the president had in mind when he set this system up, but I don't know what it was he expected to happen, either. The whole basis of our system of government is that you need to design institutions that will work tolerably well whether or not all offices are held by people of stellar moral fiber. As long as the president's going to go on Arabic-language television to deliver petulant lectures about the virtues of democracy, that's a point he may want to revisit. Unless we change the policy, this is just going to happen again.

--Matthew Yglesias

RUMSFELD MUST GO. So says Thomas Friedman:

We are in danger of losing something much more important than just the war in Iraq. We are in danger of losing America as an instrument of moral authority and inspiration in the world. I have never known a time in my life when America and its president were more hated around the world than today. I was just in Japan, and even young Japanese dislike us. It's no wonder that so many Americans are obsessed with the finale of the sitcom "Friends" right now. They're the only friends we have, and even they're leaving.

This administration needs to undertake a total overhaul of its Iraq policy; otherwise, it is courting a total disaster for us all.

That overhaul needs to begin with President Bush firing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld — today, not tomorrow or next month, today. What happened in Abu Ghraib prison was, at best, a fundamental breakdown in the chain of command under Mr. Rumsfeld's authority, or, at worst, part of a deliberate policy somewhere in the military-intelligence command of sexually humiliating prisoners to soften them up for interrogation, a policy that ran amok.

Either way, the secretary of defense is ultimately responsible, and if we are going to rebuild our credibility as instruments of humanitarian values, the rule of law and democratization, in Iraq or elsewhere, Mr. Bush must hold his own defense secretary accountable.

The St. Louis Post Dispatch agrees:

DEFENSE SECRETARY DONALD RUMSFELD should resign and take his top deputies with him. That includes Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary Douglas Feith.

It's not just Mr. Rumsfeld's latest fiasco, the botched handling of the investigation of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison.

It's not just that Mr. Rumsfeld seriously underestimated the number of U.S. troops required for the occupation of Iraq and the potential for American casualties.

It's not just that Mr. Rumsfeld seriously overestimated the threat from weapons of mass destruction.

It's not just that Mr. Rumsfeld ignored the State Department's plans for the occupation and relied on private security forces and private companies with no-bid contracts.

It's not just that U.S. policy in Iraq has devolved in dangerous ad hocery, with one day's decision reversed the next day.

It's not just that Mr. Rumsfeld had charged around the world insulting key allies.

It's the accumulation of all these miscalculations, misconceptions and missteps - and an arrogant inability to admit his mistakes - that require him to step down. If the Defense Department were a corporation, its CEO would be long gone.

Expect the chorus to grow. Rumfeld's resignation, coupled with the razing of Abu Ghraib prison, as Sens. Ben Nelson (D-Nebraska) and Pat Roberts (R-Kansas) have proposed, may be the only two courses of action with enough weight to quell this scandal and show the world we take it as seriously as we ought to.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

"AMBUSH BY PULL QUOTE." That's the Campaign Desk's Thomas Lang's apt description of what the Wall Street Journal pulled yesterday when it published Vietnam vet John O'Neill's attack on John Kerry. In essence, the paper's editors cobbled together a passage that never actually appears in the op-ed, put it between quotes, and made it the pull-quote. (If you don't know what that is, Lang explains.) And the resulting quote is disingenuous in the extreme. Kevin Drum has the visuals here.

Remember: O'Neill never served with John Kerry. Ever. His emergence as a credible voice against Kerry is, unfortunately, based largely on the assumption that he did -- an assumption he has not tried too hard to dispel, and that George W. Bush's surrogates at the Journal and elsewhere have tried actively to promote.

--Nick Confessore

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE. The Next Step in Iraq: Should we stay; can we go? TAP debates the U.S. military presence in Iraq. By Dennis Kucinich and Michael O'Hanlon.

POSTCARDS FROM THE RESPONSIBILITY ERA. "The Today Show" had Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) and Donald Rumsfeld on this morning. Biden, it's worth noting, was very critical of how the Iraqi prison abuses were handled. More interesting, however, was Rumsfeld's appearance. Speaking for myself, I'm not convinced it's such a scandal that the public didn't know about this sooner. (Why the appropriate Members of Congress weren't notified earlier is another question.) What did strike me, however, was Rumsfeld's ducking of responsibility:

MATT LAUER: When you say the system worked, you are talking about the system of investigation. Clearly there are parts of the system in place in the prisons in Iraq that are broken. The military report calls these incidents, quote, "horrific abuses." It continues to say they were, quote, "wanton acts of soldiers in an unsupervised and dangerous setting."

So who, Mr. Secretary, is ultimately responsible for that "unsupervised and dangerous setting"?

DONALD RUMSFELD: Well, clearly it's -- the United States Army and the Central Command have the responsibility for the management of the prisons in that part of the world and they are determining responsibility at the present time. There have already been some criminal actions undertaken.

How about "I, the secretary of defense, am ultimately responsible" for the conduct of American soldiers? (In theory, of course, the commander-in-chief -- President Bush -- is ultimately responsible, but put that aside for the moment.) As the Washington Post rightly editorializes today, the problem is not merely the acts of torture perpetrated at Abu Grahib, but the Pentagon's broader attitude towards the treatment of prisoners and the vague, arbirtrary standards for imprisonment and interrogation they have been using since Afghanistan:

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld yesterday described the abuses of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison as "an exceptional, isolated" case. At best, that is only partly true. Similar mistreatment of prisoners held by U.S. military or intelligence forces abroad has been reported since the beginning of the war on terrorism. A pattern of arrogant disregard for the protections of the Geneva Conventions or any other legal procedure has been set from the top, by Mr. Rumsfeld and senior U.S. commanders. Well-documented accounts of human rights violations have been ignored or covered up, including some more serious than those reported at Abu Ghraib. In the end, the latest allegations may be distinguished mainly by the fact that they have led to court-martial charges -- and by the leak of shocking photographs that brought home to Americans, and the world, the gravity of the offenses.

Rectifying the problems dramatized by the Abu Ghraib photos will require far more than prosecution of a handful of reservists who committed abuses. Military intelligence officers and private contractors who encouraged or ordered maltreatment also must be prosecuted. Senior officers and administration officials responsible for creating the lawless system of detention and interrogation employed in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere since 2001 should be held accountable. And the system itself must, at last, be changed to conform with the Geneva Conventions and other international norms of human rights. Congress, above all, must finally begin to exercise its authority to oversee and regulate the administration's handling of foreign detainees. That several of its senior Republican members were proclaiming themselves shocked yesterday to learn of the abuses -- as if none had been previously reported -- was itself shameful.

I agree.

I'm glad to see that the two senior Army officers involved in prison operations in Iraq, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt and Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, issued appropriately profuse and sincere apologies today. That's what taking responsibility is all about. Someone should tell President Bush, who, during the first of his speeches to Arab television today, did not deign to apologize on behalf of the U.S., but lectured listeners on how America is a free society and that "the America I know has sent troops into Iraq to promote freedom -- good, honorable citizens that are helping the Iraqis every day." This is a remarkably ostrich-like response. I'm willing to cut the president some slack for not knowing about the atrocities until he saw the pictures on CBS. (It was up to the Pentagon to keep him informed, as Biden pointed out today.) But the whole problem here is that the America that most actual Arabs know is not the one Bush knows, and stories of abuse and torture coming out of American-run prisons in Iraq carry a lot more weight than the bromides of a leader they have little trust in anyway.

CORRECTION: Reader M.B. tells me that Kimmitt is not involved in prison operations in Iraq, but is rather the chief spokesman for Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, head of U.S. forces in Iraq. My bad.

--Nick Confessore

THE LIMITS OF PUBLIC DIPLOMACY. As my colleague Garance Franke-Ruta writes below the news coming out of Abu Ghraib is an emerging public relations catastrophe for the United States. Under the circumstances, it's doubtless a good idea for the president to go on Arab television (refusing to go on Al-Jazeera which has the largest audience and the most credibility among viewers, on the other hand, seems pretty questionable) to try and stem the damage. But when you're dealing with a public that's disinclined to take the president's word at face value, it seems that action is more called for. The president could start by bothering to read the Taguba report into what went on.

Or, as Kevin Drum suggests, they might want to consider getting the accused civilian contractors at least out of the country while further inquiries are underway. Even better, as The Washington Post's editorial page says, would be doing something about the policy environment in which these events occurred:

SECRETARY OF Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld yesterday described the abuses of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison as "an exceptional, isolated" case. At best, that is only partly true. Similar mistreatment of prisoners held by U.S. military or intelligence forces abroad has been reported since the beginning of the war on terrorism. A pattern of arrogant disregard for the protections of the Geneva Conventions or any other legal procedure has been set from the top, by Mr. Rumsfeld and senior U.S. commanders. Well-documented accounts of human rights violations have been ignored or covered up, including some more serious than those reported at Abu Ghraib. In the end, the latest allegations may be distinguished mainly by the fact that they have led to court-martial charges -- and by the leak of shocking photographs that brought home to Americans, and the world, the gravity of the offenses.

Rectifying the problems dramatized by the Abu Ghraib photos will require far more than prosecution of a handful of reservists who committed abuses. Military intelligence officers and private contractors who encouraged or ordered maltreatment also must be prosecuted. Senior officers and administration officials responsible for creating the lawless system of detention and interrogation employed in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere since 2001 should be held accountable. And the system itself must, at last, be changed to conform with the Geneva Conventions and other international norms of human rights. Congress, above all, must finally begin to exercise its authority to oversee and regulate the administration's handling of foreign detainees. That several of its senior Republican members were proclaiming themselves shocked yesterday to learn of the abuses -- as if none had been previously reported -- was itself shameful.

The foundation for the crimes at Abu Ghraib was laid more than two years ago, when Mr. Rumsfeld instituted a system of holding detainees from Afghanistan not only incommunicado, without charge, and without legal process, but without any meaningful oversight mechanism at all. Brushing off his violation of the Geneva Conventions, Mr. Rumsfeld maintained that the system was necessary to extract important intelligence. But it was also an invitation to abuses -- and reports of those abuses have been appearing since at least December 2002, when a Post story reported on harsh "stress and duress" interrogation techniques bordering on physical torture. Other reports by journalists and such groups as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch documented the lawless detention and criminal treatment of detainees, including the deaths of at least two prisoners at the Bagram air base in Afghanistan that were ruled homicides by military investigators. Yesterday the Army revealed that two Iraqi prisoners were killed by U.S. prison guards last year and that 20 other detainee deaths and assaults are still being investigated in Iraq and Afghanistan. No one has been criminally charged in any of these deaths.

Quite so. You can't go out of your way to claim that detainees are neither prisoners of war (protected by the Geneva Conventions) nor criminals (protected by the constitution) and then profess to be shocked when it turns out that abuses are taking place. These stories haven't attracted much attention in America, but they've been big in the international press and Arabs are certainly aware of them. Recent revelations have made it perfectly clear that assurances that nothing untoward is taking place in various U.S. detention centers are not something that people should take seriously. An administration that's serious about changing America's image around the world needs to do something to take care of these substantive complaints, not just try and spin them away.

--Matthew Yglesias

BLOWBACK. If ever there was doubt that the war in Iraq has assisted with terrorist recruitment and made America less safe, as Richard Clarke and many others have argued, those doubts can now be laid to rest. The anger and disgust over the possible war crimes committed by American soldiers and private military contractors in Abu Ghraib fueled this London protest yesterday:

Demonstrators chant 'Bomb London, bomb New York' and 'We are terrorists' outside Downing Street, London, Tuesday May 4, 2004, on the day that the British government announced that it will make a statement concerning the photographs which allegedly show British soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners.

This is only the tip of the iceberg. The protestors carried signs, according to this picture, reading "Remember Remember 11th September" and "Is this your freedom?"

I was speaking to a Turkish journalist here in Washington who tells me of more photos, and a videotape, including scenes of female prisoners being sexually assaulted, that she has seen and that are being widely circulated in Arab media circles. "They are unpublishable," she tells me.

The British press also reports the existence of additional photos on an Arab language web site, including photos of a female prisoner being raped at gunpoint. The photos have not been verified and may or may not be real. The verified abuse photos shown on 60 Minutes have been put online by The New Yorker (click "view the images" under "Related Links"). I have not seen further pictures and so don't know what to believe regarding what I haven't seen. But I do know that many, especially in Arab or Muslim nations, are believing everything they see and hear, including charges that may later be proven false, and that there are many more charges of abuse abroad in the world than what we are hearing of here in the U.S.

The Taguba Report completed by the military, which MSNBC helpfully posted online yesterday, catalogs some of the abuses and existence of a great deal more documentary evidence than has thus far been publicly revealed in the U.S., including explicit videos and a photo of male American guard having sex with a female Iraqi prisoner. The critical Taguba findings:

6. (S) I find that the intentional abuse of detainees by military police personnel included the following acts:

a. (S) Punching, slapping, and kicking detainees; jumping on their naked feet;

b. (S) Videotaping and photographing naked male and female detainees;

c. (S) Forcibly arranging detainees in various sexually explicit positions for photographing;

d. (S) Forcing detainees to remove their clothing and keeping them naked for several days at a time;

e. (S) Forcing naked male detainees to wear women’s underwear;

f. (S) Forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate themselves while being photographed and videotaped;

g. (S) Arranging naked male detainees in a pile and then jumping on them;

h. (S) Positioning a naked detainee on a MRE Box, with a sandbag on his head, and attaching wires to his fingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture;

i. (S) Writing “I am a Rapest” (sic) on the leg of a detainee alleged to have forcibly raped a 15-year old fellow detainee, and then photographing him naked;

j. (S) Placing a dog chain or strap around a naked detainee’s neck and having a female Soldier pose for a picture;

k. (S) A male MP guard having sex with a female detainee;

l. (S) Using military working dogs (without muzzles) to intimidate and frighten detainees, and in at least one case biting and severely injuring a detainee;

m. (S) Taking photographs of dead Iraqi detainees....

8. (U) In addition, several detainees also described the following acts of abuse, which under the circumstances, I find credible based on the clarity of their statements and supporting evidence provided by other witnesses (ANNEX 26):

a. (U) Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees;

b. (U) Threatening detainees with a charged 9mm pistol;

c. (U) Pouring cold water on naked detainees;

d. (U) Beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair;

e. (U) Threatening male detainees with rape;

f. (U) Allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell;

g. (U) Sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick.

h. (U) Using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.

It's been hard to measure success in the war on terrorism. Clearly, though, the abuses at Abu Ghraib that have so incensed international opinion -- and rightly so -- must be considered a stunning blow against America in that ongoing fight. They have shown American power shamefully deployed, and they have granted new credibility to the claims against us. It is hard to imagine that the anger sparked by these photos and what a few Americans have done in Iraq will not some day redound against us all.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

ALL AROUND THE WORLD. The other day on the Factor, Bill O'Reilly and Tim Graham were talking liberal media bias:

O'REILLY: So the first one we're going to talk about is "The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill." Right? The author is Ron Suskind. And this is the book where O'Neill came in and said Bush was an idiot. All right? The reviewer is Michael Tomasky, executive editor of "American Prospect," perhaps the most liberal magazine in the world. So why would you put a liberal guy to review a book? What do you think?

TIM GRAHAM, MEDIA RESEARCH CENTER: Well, everybody expects a book reviewer to have an opinion, but when you select who is going to have an opinion and you overwhelmingly select liberal people who don't like George Bush, yes, you've gone beyond an obvious bias to kind of a hilarious bias.

Now it's too bad Graham and O'Reilly don't know what they're talking about, because they were in the neighborhood of a good point. Just three days after running Tomasky's (brilliant, of course) review, the Times decided to review the book again, and this time got Katrina Vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, a distinctly more liberal magazine, to do the honors. It seems to me conservatives could legitimately complain about that. I assure O'Reilly, however, that you can get further left than that should you be so inclined.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE. Matthew Yglesias and David Brock each take on the fair and balanced news.

• On the Ground: Official reports on the progress of Iraqi reconstruction are anything but encouraging. By Matthew Yglesias.
• Bias Crimes: Brock once worked inside the "Republican noise machine." Now, with a new Web site, he's trying to silence it. By Tara McKelvey.

MALPRACTICE TO DECEIVE. The New York Times Magazine had an excellent package on American health care a few weeks ago, and the current issue includes letters written in response. According to an editor's note, many of the letters attacked the package's lead article, by Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), for not conceding that malpractice lawsuits are driving up the cost of healthcare. And if the selection of letters chosen by the editors is any indication, many of those writing in were doctors.

As an emergency physician approaching my 20th anniversary on the front line, providing care to all who arrive at my facility, I agree about many of the maladies of our health care system as diagnosed by Senator Clinton. There is, however, one curious omission in her article: the medical malpractice quagmire. Any redesigned system must address the wanton waste of money and resources that practicing defensive medicine forces on the medical profession.
Peter J. Waldman, D.O.
Flanders, N.J.

In her book "Living History,'' Senator Clinton repeatedly says that she thought like a lawyer when faced with a problem. It is malpractice suits that have driven up health care costs and compromised patient care. Yet this is not mentioned in her article. We challenge her to last even one week working in our rural orthopedic surgical practice, where the patient population is 68 percent Medicare and the reimbursement is 20 cents on the dollar, while our malpractice premium rose by 25 percent this year.
Lorraine K. Doyle, M.D
Lawrence D. Chilnick
Asheville, N.C.

Clinton refers to research arguing that close to a third of the $1.6 trillion we spend on health care is duplicative. Possibly some or all of this duplicative care is performed to help protect health care workers and hospitals from trial lawyers. She might have mentioned the cost of litigation in the United States as one of the factors skewering our health care costs up relative to other countries.
Michael Gooch
Rumson, N.J.

It's true that rising malpractice premiums are making it more expensive to practice medicine (although, as a recent General Accounting Office showed, this doesn't seem to driving any significant number of doctors out of business, as the anti-tort crowd and the Bush administration have claimed). But contrary to the Times' letter-writers, there is no evidence at all that these increases are being driven by frivolous lawsuits. Rather, the increases stem from bad investment practices among the companies that offer malpractice insurance, companies that go largely unregulated. And the effort to pin the blame on lawsuits owes much more to the exigencies of domestic politics than anything else. Check out Stephanie Mencimer's National Magazine Award-nominated article on this subject for more details.

--Nick Confessore

GOOD CATHOLICS AND BAD, CONT'D AGAIN. Practicing Catholic and Tory conservative Andrew Sullivan has a good column up on Catholicism and politics, managing to get a little deeper into the theological questions than anyone else I've seen. He's somewhat critical of Kerry's positioning on abortion, but argues strongly against those who would punish pro-choice Catholic Democrats through excommunication. (He doesn't get into the blatant hypocrisy of Republican pro-choice Catholics getting off the hook, but that's okay.) It's well done, as Sullivan's writing on religion usually is.

I'd also recommend this very good editorial in the National Catholic Reporter. The editorialist makes two salutary points. One is that abortion -- contrary to the opinion of some conservative prelates and the right-wing laity -- does not really trump the death penalty in the degree of importance to which each is accorded under Catholic doctrine; the church Catechism includes both as teachings arising from the Fifth Commandment, "Thou Shall Not Kill." (Sullivan makes this point, too.) So why no calls to excommunicate radically pro-capital punishment legislators?

The second point is that, when it comes to abortion, George W. Bush is eminently guilty of playing politics, not principle:

It is true that the president talks a good antiabortion game. His rhetorical winks and nods to Catholics (he constantly invokes "the culture of life") are skillful. And, through appointments and private meetings, he’s nice to the bishops, who can use all the friends they can get these days and who are correctly seen as this nation’s leading opponents of legal abortion.

But even if Bush is sincere in his pro-life convictions, he is engaged in a cynical political game...If the 1 million-plus annual abortions in this country are the abomination the bishops say they are, and if George W. Bush agrees with that analysis, when will he deliver the Oval Office speech decrying the practice? When will he push the logic of Roe v. Wade (which allows for regulation of late-term abortions except where the life or health of the mother is endangered) and call on state legislatures to explicitly ban third-trimester abortions? Why is the president not leading the charge for a Constitutional amendment to ban elective abortion? Given the gravity of the situation, why isn’t abortion the president’s number one legislative priority?

Ah, say the president’s pro-life supporters, but he has signed the ban on partial-birth abortions and the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, recent legislation that treats an unborn child as a victim when a pregnant mother is killed in the commission of a federal crime.

How many fewer abortions will there be as a result of those pieces of legislation? Exactly zero. None. For in the former case, doctors performing late-term abortions will simply use a different procedure; and the latter piece of legislation is, however welcome, pure symbolism.

In fact, in his only Oval Office speech in which he addressed right-to-life issues, our Solomonesque president metaphorically split the baby in half. Rather than ban federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, the president chose -- contrary to Catholic teaching -- to allow research on existing stem cell lines. Bush’s Health and Human Services Secretary, Tommy Thompson, the antiabortion Catholic who must administer the policy, told NCR: "I have to minister to the needs of all Americans, not just Catholics." Said Thompson, "I can't do my job, carrying out the policies of this administration and previous administrations, by solely relying on Catholic teachings."

And yet it is incumbent upon all good Catholics to vote for the Republican candidate? Hardly.

UPDATE: Reader M.H. writes in with a very good point: What about birth control? Looking at the catechism again, I'm reminded that orthodox Catholicism doesn't make any distinction between aborting embryos -- that is, birth control -- and aborting, say, a second-trimester fetus. It's all abortion, as far as they are concerned. No doubt some of those attacking Kerry for supporting traditional reproductive freedoms also abhor the pill, but are aware that this puts them on the fringe of American opinion. So they claim to stand on principle and give a pass to the vast majority of American politicians, Republican and Democratic, who make no public quarrel with contraception, and yet attack Kerry and other Democrats for supporting abortion rights.

--Nick Confessore

LESS TAXES, MORE MONEY. Over in The Corner Jonah Goldberg finds vindication for Republican economic dogma:

How strange. We've cut taxes but revenues are increasing.

The great danger of blogging is that readers may see the links, but not actually click on them. Here's what Jonathan Weisman's article in The Washington Post says:

Smaller-than-expected tax refunds and rising individual tax receipts will pare back federal borrowing significantly for the first half of this year and could reduce the $521 billion deficit projected for the fiscal year by as much as $100 billion, Treasury and congressional budget officials said yesterday. . . .

All of this indicates that the improving economy is beginning to slow a three-year slide in overall tax receipts.

In other words, revenue isn't increasing. Rather, it's falling more slowly than it has in the recent past. Actual revenue is higher than previous projections of revenue for this year, but not higher than actual revenue from the previous year. Either way, tax cut fueled growth can't possibly fix America's budgetary problems, given the current spending trends. As you'll see at the bottom of this page, under the Bush administration spending has increased not just in absolute terms, but as a proportion of GDP. That means revenue, too, needs to grow, not just in absolute terms, but as a proportion of GDP.

--Matthew Yglesias

SECRETS AND LIES. The Boston Globe has an excellent piece up today that puts out into the journalism mainstream a point that bloggers and partisans have been making a lot: That the Bush administration, for all its self-serving emphasis on executive privilege and bureaucratic secrecy, routinely declassifies sensitive information if it serves a political purpose:

In several recent cases, the administration first refused requests for information by saying that releasing it would jeopardize national security, then released that same information itself at a moment when it became politically convenient to do so -- leaving the impression that it was safe to release all along.

After first refusing to allow Congress to see a memo about Al Qaeda from a month before the 2001 attacks, and then letting only some of the 9/11 Commission see it in private, the White House released the entire document to quell rising public pressure. After the Justice Department fought the American Civil Liberties Union in court to suppress statistics on how often it used the Patriot Act, Attorney General John Ashcroft called a news conference and announced them.

Last week, President Bush himself rebuked Ashcroft for declassifying Justice Department memos from the Clinton era showing deliberations involving Jamie Gorelick, the number two Justice official under Clinton who is now a member of the 9/11 Commission, over how the CIA and FBI could share terrorism information.

Concern over the integrity of the national security secrecy system comes as a new oversight report has revealed a surge in secrecy: the US government classified 14 million new national-security secrets last year, up from 11 million in the previous year and 8 million the year before.

Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive project at George Washington University, said the rising wave of national-security classifications, coupled with disclosures of formerly secret information that "doesn't pass the guffaw test," jeopardizes the protection of legitimate secrets, such as the names of covert operatives or the designs of weapons systems.

Note that it took a news peg -- President Bush rebuking his attorney general for a politically-motivated declassification -- to get this story out. That's just the way the media works, unfortunately. But the story's quite good.

--Nick Confessore

KILL BILL. This morning, I arrived at work to find a galley copy of Presidential Leadership: Rating the Best and the Worst in the White House, a new essay collection edited -- this made me laugh -- by James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal and Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society, with a foreword by William Bennett. It's not that Taranto, Leo, and Bennett are dummies. It's just that one can practically see the deck being stacked, with all the subtlety of a ton of bricks. Nearly all of the contributors hail from the right end of the spectrum, and while the results are not always predictable -- Harvey Mansfield delivers a nuanced take on Ronald Reagan, for example -- in one particular case the outcome was probably foreordained.

I speak, of course, of the essay on one William Jefferson Clinton, authored by the conservative historian Paul Johnson. It is perhaps unreasonable to believe that anything edited by anyone affiliated with the Journal editorial page could even begun to have its head on straight with regard to Clinton, but still, here's how Johnson begins:

Presenting a just estimate of the Clinton presidency will pose perhaps insoluble problems to historians. The printed records of his doings, misdoings, and omissions is unarguably deplorable from start to finish. Yet he was re-elected without difficulty, and some would argue that, had it been constitutionally possible for him to run for a third term, he would have been elected again.

The rest of the piece is not altogether unfair to Clinton, but you have to ponder the cognitive dissonance of this passage. Perhaps the reason that Clinton was re-elected -- and, if opinion polls are any guide, could have cruised to a third term if that was an option -- is because his record is less unarguably deplorable than Johnson and the Journal believe, at least in the opinion of the many voters whose lives and incomes improved during Clinton's eight years.

--Nick Confessore

ONWARDS AND UPWARDS. Turns out you're not supposed to lie to Congress:

The Congressional Research Service says the Bush administration apparently violated federal law by ordering the chief Medicare actuary to withhold information from Congress indicating that the new Medicare law could cost far more than White House officials had said.

In a report on Monday, the research service said that Congress's "right to receive truthful information from federal agencies to assist in its legislative functions is clear and unassailable." Since 1912, it said, federal laws have protected the rights of federal employees to communicate with Congress, and recent laws have "reaffirmed and strengthened" those protections.

Who knew? Well, actually it was pretty obvious. So who's left to speak up for the defense?

William A. Pierce, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said on Monday that the propriety of Mr. Scully's action was being investigated by the agency's inspector general. In any event, Mr. Pierce said, "we are looking to the future, not the past."

Looking to the future, not the past. It seems to me that this is something I keep hearing over and over again. It's more important to look at the future of health care reform than to figure out who, exactly, misled the Congress into supporting the last round of it. It's more important to look at the future of counterterrorism policy than to figure out who, exactly, was responsible for messing it up last time around. It's more important to figure out what to do about Iraq in the future than to figure out who, exactly, misled the public about the nature of the threat while failing to adequately plan for postwar stabilization.

These are all reasonable and high-minded-sounding things to say, but when you've created a situation where there's no accountability at all for the incompetence and criminality in which your administration is, frankly, drenched then there's every reason to think that things will only get worse in the future. On one level, holding people to account for this Medicare business isn't the biggest deal in the world -- the system needs major reforms one way or the other, and it's a complicated problem that's going to require serious thought and hard work. On another level, though, it's a very big deal. There's simply no way the Congress could ever pass a reasonable Medicare reform unless they can obtain accurate information about costs. Congressional leaders -- even leaders of the same party that controls the White House -- simply can't let stuff like this slide.

--Matthew Yglesias

GOOD CATHOLICS AND BAD, CONT'D. Last month I wrote a bit about conservative efforts to gin up stories getting Catholic Democrats in trouble for being bad believers. Jeanne D'Arc at Body & Soul, along with Atrios, have also been following this theme, pointing out that that there seems to be little attention -- no articles in the press, no interviewing of Catholic voters, no calls for bishops to deny communion -- directed at such pro-choice Catholic Republicans as George Pataki and Tom Ridge. There's been some development on this front in the last few days. Atrios and his readers blew the whistle on an outrageously distorted NPR article by Barbara Hagerty, which in a supposed random sample of Catholics emerging from an early-morning, non-Sunday mass, drew three of her four quotes from individuals closely connected with Washington's religious conservative community, the Catholic members of which, I've pointed out, have as their goal pushing the Catholic hierarchy to get more actively involved in the political debate over abortion and less involved in debates over poverty, nuclear weapons, and the like. Atrios also discovered that Hagerty is affiliated with the World Journalism Institute, of which more here.

Obviously, I don't think religious people should be banned from working at newspapers. But when it comes to the day job, they do need to put their professional obligations ahead of their personal beliefs, just as any news reporter, liberal or conservative, is supposed to. In her piece, Hagerty makes the absurd and demonstrably false statement that in order to win election, Kerry must prove he's a "good Catholic." (As I noted in my original post on this, most Catholics are not "good Catholics" by any orthodox standard, and they certainly do not vote overwhelmingly or even in the majority against Catholic candidates for not being orthodox enough.)

Jeanne D'Arc has some more thoughts and commentary here. It's worth noting that, by all appearances, most U.S. bishops don't really want to go into the mud on this -- don't want to get sucked into the right's game of using them to bolster the fight against reproductive freedoms while ignoring virtually everything else Catholic doctrine has to say. But there are exceptions. No More Mister Nice Blog posts on two, here and here.

--Nick Confessore

WINNING THE WAR ON TERROR? Unveiling the State Department's new Patterns of Global Terrorism report, Ambassador Cofer Black sounded a positive note:

Last year, we saw unprecedented collaboration between the United States and foreign partners to defeat terrorism. We also saw the lowest number of international terrorist attacks since 1969, and that's a 34-year low.

There were 190 acts of international terrorism in 2003. That's a slight decrease from 198 attacks that occurred the previous year, and a drop of 45 percent from the 2001 level of 346 attacks.

So are we winning the war on terror? Not really. For one thing, these statistics exclude most attacks on US forces in Afghanistan and Iraq on the grounds that blowing up soldiers isn't really terrorism. There's a certain logic to that, though it's at odds with the conventional understanding of the attack on the USS Cole and the Beirut barracks bombing as well as deeply at odds with the administration's account of what we're doing in Iraq. If you add those in, terrorism was up in 2003 from it's 2002 status. Even if you don't want to consider those attacks terrorism, the best you can say is that we're distracting would-be terrorists by giving them the opportunity to kill soldiers rather than civilians.

As last year's report noted, moreover, the main cause of the 2001-2002 decline was "the sharp drop in oil pipeline bombings in Colombia" along with a diplomatic initiative in Sri Lanka. These are both welcome developments, but hardly the sort of thing people have in mind when discussing progress in the war on terrorism. Meanwhile, as Michael Ignatieff writes in The New York Times Magazine, Islamist terror seems to have "metastasized into a cancer of independent terrorist cells that, while claiming inspiration from Al Qaeda, no longer require its direction, finance or advice." Needless to say, the Bush administration seems to think the threat has abated sufficiently that we can afford to spend more money on a non-functional ballistic missile shield than on, say, securing ports against terrorist attacks.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE ABU GHRAIB INQUIRY. I strongly encourage readers to peruse these excerpts from Major General Antonio Taguba's inquiry into American misconduct at the Abu Ghraib prison. The words aren't nearly as immediately gripping as the photographs we all saw over the weekend, but they give you a better sense of the problem.

A fairly large number of people seem to have, at best, fallen down on their jobs as supervisors here, and if the president wants to have any hope of avoiding a total public relations debacle he needs to pursue the investigation very zealously. It's important to remember that while Americans are inclined to think the best of our fellow citizens and their intentions, Arabs are not. Blithe assurances that this doesn't reflect U.S. policy or a hunt for a handful of scapegoats isn't going to cut it. Worse, as Kevin Drum notes, the Army doesn't seem to have been in any hurry to implement recommendations they were getting about curbing abuses. And as Henry Farrel reminds me, allegations of this sort of thing have been around for quite some time. In all this, the government seems to have had an attitude of acting only when it's hand is absolutely forced by public pressure, rather than moving aggressively to head of potentially problematic situations. This is no way to build a model democracy.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE. Don't miss our interview with Ambassador Joseph Wilson, author of The Politics of Truth and recipient of the classic Karl Rove treatment.

• Patriot Act: Nine months after Valerie Plame was outed, her husband blames Scooter, Karl, and that "lying SOB" Dick Cheney. An interview with Ambassador Joseph Wilson. By Tara McKelvey.
• Roadkill: In an effort to steamroll Democrats, Republicans are holding up an important bill that would help U.S. highways. By Mary Lynn F. Jones.
• Outsmarting Outsourcing: Time-tested policies can keep the American middle class strong in the new global economy. By Robert Kuttner.

WEEKEND UPDATE. Distracted by all the porn in the Sunday Times? Here's what you missed:

The Columnists

• David Brooks. People in different neighborhoods do different things -- crazy.

• Nicholas Kristof. If I write more about Burger Kind will I be as famous as Tom?

• Thomas Friedman. Not until you learn to write column about China based on talking to American expatriates in Japan.

• Maureen Dowd. Why don't conservatives want you to see dead soldiers?

• Jim Hoagland. Europeans are just so . . . old.

• David Broder. So they must love Bob Edwards, right?

• Jackson Diehl. That Ralph Nader wouldn't really be a very good president.

• David Ignatius. If only someone had listened to the State Department. . . .

• Robert Kagan. Bush's commitment is sincere, but his advisors are misleading him -- yeah, yeah, that's the ticket.

The Op-Ed You Actually Need To Read

• Adam Davidson on corruption in the CPA.

--Matthew Yglesias