So says John Keegan, military historian in a piece posted at NRO:

During the First Gulf War special forces attempted to attack the Scud threat by finding and eliminating the launchers themselves, a frustrating task given the ease with which they could be moved and hidden. The decision, in the Iraq war, to focus attention on potential launch sites proved much more fruitful. Very few of Saddam's surviving Scuds were launched against coalition targets and none against surrounding countries, such as Israel.

Hmm, I thought Blix and them said they had no Scuds.

From the World Tribune:

The United States has also expressed concern that Al Qaida, particularly Abu Mussib Al Zarqawi, could gain access to what officials said could be an arsenal of hundreds shells filled with sarin or mustard gas. Dozens of such shells have been found by U.S. troops over the last year.

Granted, this is in an article where a Russian guy says that terrorists are trying to get WMD by working with scientists in Iraq (which is what Duelfer said in an interview with Fox News in a post below) and the same guy says that Saddam and Al Qaeda are not connected, even though Prime Minister Allawi of Iraq thinks otherwise.

Lots of folks - including Michael Ledeen - are laying the smackdown on Paul Krugman for attempting a guilt by association or something on Simone Ledeen, Michael Ledeen's daughter.

Regardless of what it is that Krugman is attempting to say, there was a very extensive article about Ms. Ledeen and some of her colleagues at CPA in the Washington Post about a month ago. It does make the circumstances of her employment sound a little, well, sketchy:

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.

With no other information about Ms. Ledeen's employment situation, an email "out of the blue" from the White House inviting her to such a job - especially since the paper also says that the people in the article - including Ms. Ledeen - ended up making the equivalent of six figure salaries (of course, remember, this is the Post - a group of people is described as having salaries from $30-75,000 - and "almost" everyone makes that equivalent.)

At any rate, Ms. Ledeen entire resume is presented as "cofounded a cooking school" - failing to note her MBA and that she had held a position as a Vice President in a company.

The article isn't totally negative:

Ledeen was determined to prove she could do her job. She and the others worked 100-hour weeks and ended up producing not only their assigned report but a searchable Web site of possible reconstruction projects. At the end of their six-week assignment, their bosses were so impressed that they were rewarded with more permanent postings.

And

Also, it appears that Josh Marshall did an article where he questioned Ms. Ledeen's qualifications, too.

UPDATE: Jinkies, this internet thing is pretty darn cool. Over at Roger Simon's, Ms. Ledeen is facing down some of her critics in real time. What a smackdown!

Well, kinda. He posted over on NRO that there were a couple of good but troubling posts at Volokh Conspiracy (actually, there are probably more than a couple, he just pointed to these two.) I wanted to respond to the posts and the good but troubling comment on them.

Post 1 - a discussion about Australian politics and US concerns about them. Seems that John Howard who has been a very strong ally may be in trouble against a guy who promises that he will remove Australian troops from Iraq. I don't know if that is true, but certainly following the results in Spain, it ought to be a concern. And if the Aussies think that our ambassador saying that there might be consequences if that happens is a threat from us, well, I dunno. Armitage's comment does seem over the top, but I am not a fan of his anyway. He said Iran is a democracy, for goodness sakes. If the State Department is over there bigfooting the Australians, though, it is troubling, since they couldn't seem to see their way clear to do that with Turkey when we needed it. Not sure that things are exactly as the TNR article that is the source for the post says they are, but don't know that it isn't that way, either.

Post 2 - the mainstream press - NBC - accuses the White House of not acting on Zarqawi in Iraq because it wanted to keep him around as a reason to go to war against Iraq.

The premise that it comes from a "mainstream" source so it has credibility is just silly these days. And the idea that we wouldn't conduct an act of war on Iraq so we could go to war with Iraq is kinda silly, too. The referenced MSNBC article says that more than once the Pentagon offered up some cruise missile strikes on a location in Iraq prior to the war in Iraq but that the White House vetoed them. This ignores that the President had made a point that military action should be more than shooting million dollar missiles and hitting a camel in the butt. Given the success rate of such attacks on bin Laden and the later success rate of precision bombing attacks on Hussein and Chemical Ali, it seems that launching such an attack in January of 2003 - a time when we were busy saying that we had not yet decided to go to war with Iraq - would have started the war with Iraq before we were ready for it.

Really. Don't give a hoot about the guy. But as far as his dopey movie, can someone get him to read this post?

Deb over at accidental verbosity hits the nail on the head, at least for me.

The money line?

"I don't exactly fear a Kerry presidency, I just get terribly tired even thinking about it."

And that about sums up my last three months.

I am tired of arguing about the war to Liberals. I am tired of the subject changes and the utter inability to stay within the scope of the discussion. I am exhausted by having to explain, yet once again, the distinction between striking an imminent threat and striking before a threat is imminent to a person who cannot, or will not grant that such a distinction is even possible. I grow weary when I hear a liberal explain that Iran having nuclear weapons is "not such a bad thing." My response slows, and my mind aches, when I offered evidence from either a Michael Moore video, anything from Moveon.org, Barbara Streisand, or Democratic Underground. CNN drains my energy, and the NYT renders me comatose.

Honestly, doing Kerry for 8 years would be a repeat of Bill Clinton, and who the hell wants to go through that again? With the growing threat?

Wading through bullshit is tiring. And it is especially tiring when there is an endless source and no end in sight. Curiously the Bar study has been an excellent break, and I feel energized. Mainly because I am wading through a different kind of bullshit, and there is an end in sight.

The turnover of the Iraqi government yesterday was a significant achievement and milestone. One shouldn't expect that John Kerry or the Bush haters would recognize it as such. But Bush's supporters, his natural allies, should be celebrating at least a little.

Instead, a barrage of doubt. Instapundit links to a John Keegan piece that concludes:

Looking back, better a Ba'athist Iraq than an Islamic one. Let us hope that it is not too late.

"With the benefit of minute hindsight, Saddam Hussein wasn't the kind of extra-territorial menace that was assumed by the administration one year ago," Mr. Buckley said. "If I knew then what I know now about what kind of situation we would be in, I would have opposed the war."

And the Washington Post yesterday, Robin Wright on the front page editorializes that Iraq has killed the Bush doctrine though some of what he writes is demonstrably untrue, but our press has decided that the facts are not germane on this issue.

This isn't good, it isn't good at all. The turnover in Iraq is a win, and we shouldn't be turning back and going, oh, crap, we shouldn't have done that. Buckley thinking leaving Saddam Hussein in power was a good idea? Was he a participant in Oil for Food or something?

Ordinarily, I would shrug this off as part of the Bush cycle, when natural allies begin criticizing the President, and then everything turns around. It isn't insurmountable, but it isn't good.

UPDATE: I am one of the many readers who emailed Jonah Goldberg regarding WFB's statement. He offers up mighty thin gruel:

So here's what I think: I agree and I disagree. It is more than fair to say that if you thought the main reason to depose Saddam was to eliminate the threat of his Weapons of Mass Destruction to then say it wasn't worth it now that we believe with the benefit of hindsight that they weren't there. I think that is what Mr. Buckley is saying.

But this is also like saying, "If I knew then what I know now, I would have not ordered the fish." In other words, it seemed like the right decision at the time. Some think that, given new developments, this appearance was wrong and others do not. I still think the war was the right decision. Though, obviously, if we knew Saddam didn't have a major nuclear program the debate would have looked very different and the tactics available for toppling him would have been very, very different. But, ultimately, the "if I knew then what I know now" point is an academic one.

And once you concede that point we are back to the fundamental debate(s) about the war and reconstruction. Should post-9/11 America give tyrants like Saddam the benefit of the doubt in a climate of uncertainty? Was the WMD threat the only reason toppling Saddam was in our interest? Should opposition to the war justify obstruction of the reconstruction? Etc? Etc?

Okay, pace Reagan's 11th Commandment, this seems a very, umm, charitable reading of Buckley's statement. He didn't say a thing about WMD, but rather about being an "extra-territorial menace." Unless that is some $3 circumlocution for WMD, I don't see it. Buckley clearly is making the statement - assuming of course this isn't some dreadful misquote or outright fabrication by the NYT - that the war was a mistake. And by parsing and compartmentalizing that to a very narrow question about WMD, Jonah avoids the very debate that he brings up rhetorically. Was the war justified?

Having my BugOut Box post linked by Winds of Change is a good reminder to reinventory/restock (probably don't need those infant diapers anymore, for example!). Part of being prepared is preparing!

I had written before that I think that Charles Duelfer, the new head of the Iraqi Survey Group (ISG), has a different charter than David Kay - i.e., that he is going to put out more information on Iraqi WMD than previously. Alert reader and commenter AMac sent me the link to this story on Fox:

He also told Fox News that about 10 or 12 sarin and mustard gas shells have been found in various locations in Iraq.

The shells are all from the first Gulf War era and thus weakened, though intelligence sources say they’re still dangerous.

The main point of the story is that Iraqi anti-Coalition forces are trying to get Iraqi WMD scientists to work with them. But I think this "10 or 12" rounds is significant. That they are from the "first Gulf War era" is not all that significant. The binary sarin round that was found was from that era, too. In fact, all of the unaccounted for WMD material is from that era, and is the reason for all of the sanctions.

I still suspect that more news is coming on this front - as the Niger yellowcake news in the Financial Times linked below shows.

I had suggested before that the reason why the WMD info had been held closely was that it was more valuable as actionable intel than as justification for the war. I think that as the political season goes into high gear, and time has passed, and the actionable intel gets acted on, that equation changes.

The FT has now learnt that three European intelligence services were aware of possible illicit trade in uranium from Niger between 1999 and 2001. Human intelligence gathered in Italy and Africa more than three years before the Iraq war had shown Niger officials referring to possible illicit uranium deals with at least five countries, including Iraq.

This intelligence provided clues about plans by Libya and Iran to develop their undeclared nuclear programmes. Niger officials were also discussing sales to North Korea and China of uranium ore or the "yellow cake" refined from it: the raw materials that can be progressively enriched to make nuclear bombs.

The raw intelligence on the negotiations included indications that Libya was investing in Niger's uranium industry to prop it up at a time when demand had fallen, and that sales to Iraq were just a part of the clandestine export plan. These secret exports would allow countries with undeclared nuclear programmes to build up uranium stockpiles.

So much for the fake yellowcake.

And now the NYT is saying that Hussein and Al Qaeda were working together.

I've been saying all along that maybe the reason why the administration and the President haven't been apologizing for the intelligence is because they were right.

We've transferred power to Iraq a couple days early.

That's good news. Job well done, folks!

Noting some stuff from brief bits of news, and this post from Belmont Club, something tht I don't think gets much attention. This bit captures it:

From the looks of it, Zarqawi has brought in the Al Qaeda first team to derail the June 30 turnover to Shi'ite Iyad Allawi. But although he has quality, for his fighters are far better than Moqtada Al-Sadr's rabble, he has forgotten that the April upsurge of violence, which some had breathlessly hoped would signal the downfall of the US in Iraq, was only made possible by Teheran's decision to unleash simultaneous unrest in the south, in the hopes that a desperate America would pay any price for relief.

Think about this - Zarqawi is now considered to be the operational commander for Al Qaeda, the replacement for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. And he's brought the AQ first team in to disrupt the June 30 turnover. This means that AQ has made Iraq their top priority (which also means the US is not their top priority!).

A lot of people like to say that Iraq cannot be a democracy because it has no history of it, and that we are embarking on folly to try to do it. But Zarqawi has made stopping that democracy a priority for Al Qaeda - he is putting its top resources into that. If he thought we were doomed to failure, he would just let us stumble. If he thought Iraq was incapable of democracy, he would leave us alone. But he hasn't - and that means that he knows that democracy is possible - even likely - and he fears that.

We're winning.

Well, we are back. A good vacation - saw some long missed friends, repaired some relationships, relaxed on the beach - all needed things. And the world continued on, even though I had no broadband for 9 days! That may be a dangerous discovery.

So, on one of the boards that I frequent, merely for fun, this guy posts that he is creating this site called a million sorries. You needn't bother going, because he hasn't created it yet, and there is nothing to see.

Here are some of his rationales.

In an effort to say "Sorry" for the insurmountable tragedies inflicted by an unjust war, I would like to collect and distribute a MINIMUM of 1,000,000 letters not only for our Troops, but for the people in the middle east.

And

Feel free to ridicule, but I believe what I believe. "An eye for an eye makes the world go blind." This is one way we may be able to change most of the world's view regarding America.

And

Yes, F9/11 influenced me to create this. I've been wanting to do something to help humanity for quite some time, and F9/11 was the pusher."

Lastly,

If this campaign does take off, I don't want *any* of the fame and recognition that the creator of www.amillionthanks.org has obtained.

I wanted to reply to the thread, but I could not be bothered, since the discussion would not go anywhere. My burning question is simply this:

What about 9/11 made you want to apologize? I had many emotions on 9/11, and after that day, but apologetic is not one that comes to mind.

So once again, in the fascinating realm of human disposition, we get to see types that defy definition.

You know, when you think about it, this situation we are facing is not all that weird. I have made the argument that this situation is analagous to the 1930's. And in some ways it is. Fortunately there are far more of the population that appear to be aware of the threat, then there were in the 1930's. It should be remembered that Churchill was almost utterly alone in his warnings about Hitler. However, I think this situation is more analagous to the late 1940's.

Once again, Churchill proved to be prescient in his warnings about the rise of Soviet Russia. Here we have the rise of Iranian nuclear power. We should keep in mind that the United States did not really consider the USSR much of a threat until the USSR detonated its nuclear weapon. And the USSR went from detonating its Nuke to being a dire threat, very, very, quickly.

If we would have turned on the Soviets in 1945 (Yes, I understand that this would have been highly problematic) we could have ended the cold war. We could have prevented 40+ years of staring down the barrel of Armageddon. We will have the foresight to stop it from happening again?

David Warren thinks not. I agree. Democracies, for all their positive attributes, remain remarkably short sighted. The American system is incredibly well designed to deflect the selfish interest of the electorate towards positive ends. However, this never overcame the shortsighted, reactionary, foreign policies of this country. Once again, it appears, we will not deal with the immediate threat. Instead, we will watch it grow until terminating it is neither easy nor fast.

As Michael Leeden says. Faster, please.

But thinking about politics is frequently like breathing for me. And world events keep happening. However, I have not really been following the political very closely. Curiously, this has helped me actually think a little about what has been happening over the last couple of years.

I think my thought process started with this post. Specifically, this point.

"Now, I can imagine that there have been times of similar animosity. The American Civil War is an example of a major diversion in ideology that could not be reconciled. While I am not trying to say that this is analagous, I am going to say that no matter what happens in November with the Presidential election, there is a significant portion (30%) who is going to find the result very hard to take. And heaven help us if it is like 2000, with a heavily disputed result."

As I stated in that post, I was born and raised in South Africa. The United States is my adopted home. I am American by choice, and intensely patriotic, because of that choice. My patriotism, however, does not blind me to America's faults.

Most things in life are two edged swords, and this is especially true in politics. One of the most difficult things for any nation to accomplish is to establish a process of governance that is fair, democratic, and accepted by the vast majority of people in the country. I should define political process as meaning the methodology by which the people go about selecting their representatives and leaders, even if this is not democratic. The United States has done very well in this regard, perhaps too well. South Africa gave me a perspective on political process that is quite different from almost everyone I know who is an American native, born and breed here. Americans take the robustness of their political process for granted. People from countries that have seen blood spilled regularly in the political process take no process lightly.

In some ways this inherent belief in the unassailability of the American democratic system is the reason for that political process's longevity, but frequently that belief causes me concern for the process's continuation. Specifically, this presidential race may be one that damages the process badly. Here is the reasoning for my supposition.

There are partisans on both sides of the aisle. I do not claim to be non-partisan. However, I always try to ensure that my partisanship never damages the process. If my side of the aisle loses a Presidential race or control of the legislature, the process dictates that I must accept that loss with grace. I must be willing to regroup and try to win in the next round of political contest. I must be willing to accept that this was what the process brought, and be willing to change that result within the process the next time it occurs.

However, what if you believed that either the process was fundamentally unfair, or that the person who won had the ability to destroy the process? What if defeating the opposing party was more important then preserving the process? What if the process brought forth such a bad choice, that it convinced you that the process must be radically reformed in order to ensure that such a choice does not happen again? These are some of things that we may be facing in the next election.

If GWB loses this election, there is going to be a belief on the Conservative side of the aisle that the defeat was actively aided and abetted by a biased media who was willing to do whatever it took to unseat President Bush, including lie about the war in Iraq, and hide unsightly facts about Kerry. That is going to be very hard to take for these Conservatives. The media is inextricably part of the American political process. Thus, a large group will become very embittered by the system, and have difficulty accepting the result. I understand that the blogosphere, and internet are a new source of information, but I am not at all sure they are widely enough desseminated to overcome the mainstream media.

If GWB wins, however, there is a large group of people that have somehow managed to convince themselves that Bush = Hitler. All you have to do is talk to them to realize that they believe that Bush will simply destroy us in another 4 years. And if you truly believe that Bush = Hitler, you can quite easily be convinced that any action needed to unseat him is reasonable, including subverting the process for that purpose.

Therefore, we have a fairly significant group of people that are going to be deeply dissatisfied with the result whatever it is, and even more troubling, deeply dissatisfied with the process.

This is troublesome to me, because I do not share most people's belief in the inherent robustness of the American system. A political system robustness is measured by the size of the majority that buys into it. If a significant number begin to seriously opt out of the system, robustness suffers, and bad things can follow. At its most basic level democratic politics is only ideological warfare with rules that everyone agrees to abide by. The only difference, when you get right down to it, is that if our guy loses, we don't go shoot our opponents in order to get a rematch. But what if the other guy was Hitler? I mean, what if you really believed that?

So we will see. The American system is inherently robust. but;

"It is ordained in the eternal consitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions form their fetters" Edmund Burke.

*Update*

Dean Esmay makes an excellent point, one I should have addressed in the body of my post.

"Have a heart, my patriotic friend. This Republic has withstood times of strife greater than these. Rioting and looting in the streets and terrorist bombings by the dozen in the late '60s and early '70s. Outright civil war in the 1860s. We've withstood extremists like Ted Kaczinski, Terry Nichols, Tim McVeigh, and more."

And the point is valid and relevant, however, it is not determinative. I would not be so concerned if I saw that it was merely the wingnuts doing the talking. Michael Moore and David Duke.

Instead, I see that a Federal Circuit Judge has compared Bush to Mussolini and Hitler.

And that is only in the last week. There are a ton more examples that I could think of. When you have a Circuit Appellate court judge like Calabresi willing to make such a statement, what does that say for the message?

Is it out on the fringe? Not so much anymore. And that is problematic.

blaster just wanted to pass this along, and since he is not near a computer, I said I would do it for him.

"The problem with the 9/11 commission talk and those who say that the administration stated, or strongly implied, that Hussein was behind 9/11 by collaborating with AQ, are saying that the war was sold on the basis of being a retaliatory strike.

This is patently ridiculous, given the arguments about preemption and imminent threat and all that we've had over the past 2 years."

I have more thoughts about the split of the American electorate, and what consequences it might have on the process. They have sort of been rattling around my head while I have been studying the requisite 12 hours a day *yech*

I am slowly building a post, and will have it out in a few days.

Blog break here while the blaster family heads to the beach. Chances of hooking up to the net over the next week or so are kinda slim. Headed to an island, kinda like Instapundit, but, as usual, my approach is not quite so glamourous. Even my thunderstorm only knocked down a branch.

Andrew Sullivan is now writing that he has been quite clear that he's not supporting Bush. So clear that it took a reader to remind him of his position in February. Doesn't explain why he wrote this in March:

National Review's Kathryn Lopez made the following remark before my spring break: "I do wish Sullivan would save time and come out for Kerry now. In just a matter of time he will come up with the rationalizations, but it's taking him painfully long to get on with it. I'm betting all Kerry will have to do is say that he's against terrorism." I'm mystified by this remark. It has always seemed to me that a political writer is not necessarily partisan. Some of us are actually trying to figure out who's the better candidate for the next four years and haven't made our minds up already.

Jonah calling him out has had an effect. Now Sullivan writes openly that he "does not trust" the administration, but does not seem to be writing blatant lies about it - at least today.

That's what Tina Brown says. Meanwhile, over at Instapundit, we find that Hizb'allah and other Arabs like it, too.

Where are the articles and columns asking us to open our eyes and connect the dots?

Turns out that according to the 9/11 Commission, our Air Defense system was ill prepared to defend against multiple airliners being hijacked and used to crash into buildings. Almost as if it weren't even designed for something like that.

Man, we are definitely getting our money's worth out of these guys.

So when does Bill Quick toss W overboard?

Andrew Sullivan has decided that on the issue of being outed as being anti-Bush, he'll just lie about it. Everybody knows and has known of his anti-Bushness for a long time. Well, sure, lots of people - not just me - have been pointing it out for a while. People like Kathryn Jean Lopez at NRO - and as noted by Jonah in his original post - when she did so, he got all huffy about it. If it was clear to everyone and he was so open about it, why did he go to the trouble of denying it KLo?

Caught with his pants down, so to speak. Turns out he flipped on Bush a while back. Jonah's got the scoop.

That was totally unexpected!

PS Can't wait to see what Sullivan says tomorrow.

The new spin on Abu Ghraib:

NABLUS, West Bank -- The accounts of physical abuse of Iraqis by American guards at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad sounded achingly familiar to Anan Labadeh. The casual beatings, the humiliations, the trophy photos taken by both male and female guards were experiences he said he underwent as a Palestinian security detainee at an Israeli military camp in March of last year.

There was, he added, a significant difference: The Israelis have rules, he said, and their techniques for breaking down prisoners are far more sophisticated. "What the Israelis do is much more effective than beatings," he said. "Three days without food and without sleep and you're eager to tell them anything. It just shows us the Americans are amateurs. They should have taken lessons from the Israelis."

That's the problem - we don't have institutionalized mistreatment! Hmmm. Someone's going to have to tell Anne Applebaum and Andrew Sullivan.

The next paragraph, though, has the best part of the article:

Many of the questions raised by the Abu Ghraib scandal, and by the United States's self-declared war on terrorism, are the kinds that Israel has been wrestling with for decades.

Self-declared. That is just precious. Hey, Glenn Frankel, maybe you need to pick up a few archive copies of your newspaper. Or go here, and click on Enter Gallery.

Or click here. Self-declared my ass.

The Bush haters, the major press outlets (those are overlapping sets), and Andrew Sullivan are out there saying, look, let's connect the dots. Over here, you've got the Secretary of Defense signing an order that allows interrogators to keep their subjects awake for a long time, and over here you've got these pictures of Lynndie England pointing at some guys schlong and grinning. Don't you see?!?!? WHAT, ARE YOU BLIND?!?!?!

Case in point, this Anne Applebaum column in the Post today:

Item 2: The "Rumsfeld memo." This document, unearthed by the Wall Street Journal, was written in March 2003 by a Pentagon working group. It declared not only that the American president has the power to evade international law and torture foreign prisoners but that interrogators who follow the president's commands can, in addition, be held immune from prosecution.

Item 3: The Abu Ghraib photographs. Remember what they show: not just torture but guards who appear absolutely certain of their legal and moral right to torture, as well as a large number of unidentified personnel, standing around and watching.

Anne Applebaum can read minds from a picture! Of course, the fact that these things happened late at night/early morning when senior officers were not present shows they were absolutely certain of their legal and moral right, doesn't it?

Sorry, yall, you're going to have make some clearer connections than that. I mean, Rumsfeld turned down a recommendation to shave their beards, so I am thinking that he was probably pretty far back from the "anything goes" line. Unfortunately, like I said, the press no longer plans to spin this, they are simply going to lie.

The economy is indeed doing better. First sign was when they stopped calling it the "Bush economy" and yesterday Rush was pointing out that on CNN, they've discovered the "good economy" as a campaign secret, the Washington Post figured it out, even Andrew Sullivan takes note of a positive for Bush.

Ace of Spades even ran out of cowbells.

Meanwhile, on the bad timing for Kerry angle in the Post article, advantage, me.

UPDATE: By way of history repeating itself, much as we no longer hear about "the Bush economy," Jay Nordlinger writes this in his remembrance of President Reagan:

I am floating back to the world of 1980. As regular readers know, I grew up in a left-wing environment, and Ronald Reagan's name was mud. Actually, it was sometimes "Ray-gun," which was a real thigh-slapper in this era. (So was "Reaganomics" — before the president's economic program took off. Reagan delighted in saying, "You can tell our program is working, because they don't call it 'Reaganomics' anymore!")

So in his latest
piece, he notes approvingly a paragraph from the Washington Post that says that Rumsfeld says one thing and then another about Abu Ghraib. Sullivan and the Post seem think that a picture of a "hooded" prisoner - which was approved procedure - is what Rumsfeld meant when he said that pictures of Abu Ghraib represent "grievous abuse and cruelty." Please. A hood on your head is torture? But Sully just runs with it. And then he gets downright silly, writing:

Mercifully, some in the military upheld their own honor and disseminated the pictures.

Apparently Sullivan is unaware of how those pictures reached the public eye. The defense lawyers of the soldiers who did it got them to Hackworth whose wife is a consultant for CBS who got the pictures on the air. The soldiers who are in the pictures.

Just holding up their honor.

In Howard Kurtz's latest Media Notes column, he notes that Howard Stern thinks he will make a difference in the election, and he is anti-Bush.

Stern has been on a jihad against Bush due to the recent FCC crackdowns. I've heard his show a couple of times in the past couple of months, and was shocked at how the entirety of his show is an anti-Bush program. No time for talking to naked chicks anymore - just anti-Bush, all the time. Well, sort of. I heard him talking about his long war with the FCC, and he compains a lot about things that hapened in 1994, when Bush of course was a candidate for Governor of Texas. But details, details.

No doubt it is having an effect with his listeners, and Stern does have millions of them. But I suspect that the effect is not so strong as he thinks. Most of his listeners are going to be in large urban areas - the kinds of places that aren't Bush country to begin with.

I am sure that if Bush loses, Stern will take credit for it. But I don't think he'll find a Kerry administration any more hospitable to his brand of radio.

Andrew Sullivan plans to simply lie, too. In his latest about Abu Ghraib, he writes:

This kind of tactic [water-boarding] was designed specifically for a few top al Qaeda captives; but it was apparently transferred to Abu Ghraib as well. That last transition is murky. How did those new relaxed rules get moved from Guanatanamo against high-profile Qaeda terrorists to people dragged in off the street in Baghdad?

Except noone says that water-boarding was going on in Abu Ghraib. So how can he write that this kind of tactic transferred over?

I've written this before, but I think the Guardian article below raises the point again. The press no longer intends to "spin" things against President Bush and the War on Terror. They are simply going to lie about it.

I found this awesome James Lileks quote about strawmen one day:

When your opponent sets up a straw man, set it on fire and kick the cinders around the stage. Don't worry about losing the Strawperson-American community vote.

I have my matches and steel-toed boots on, here. Over at Andrew Sullivan's, he is trying to establish himself as the moral to superior to "most conservatives." Here's what he writes:

Whenever I think I'm going crazy (having qualms about extra-legal torture while most conservatives are fine with it)....

Okay, is there anyone who thinks that most conservatives are fine with "extra-legal torture?" Sure, some are. But so are some liberals. Sullivan creates a false position for "most conservatives," then feels like he is morally superior to the false position that he created.

He follows on by saying he continues to feel morally superior because William F. Buckley writes a column that agrees with him. Which is fine, of course, but it is the first time I've seen something by Buckley that appears to be factually, objectively, wrong. Sullivan quotes Buckley:

If what happened was odious, but what happened did so under the auspices of a well-organized military, then you scratch up against the lessons of Nuremberg, which held superiors responsible for misconduct by subordinates.

I think William F. Buckley got that wrong - the lessons of Nuremburg were that subordinates were not immune because they follow