In a startling development late in the presidential campaign cycle, editors of the satirical magazine The Onion have taken over the Bush-Cheney '04 Communications Office and seized at least operational control of Winger Central (WC), the office in downtown Washington near the corner of 17th and M, which sends out marching orders to conservative columnists.

The first sign of the overnight take-over came when Charles Krauthammer led off with this morning's column in the Post charging Sen. Kerry with being insufficiently respectful and supportive of America's traditional allies.

Confirmation of the scope of the takeover came later in the afternoon when President Bush denounced Kerry for dissing American allies.

"You can't lead this country" while undercutting a valued ally, the president said.

Rumors of a coming attack on Kerry for war-profiteering in connection with a secret no-bid ketchup contract for the Heinz Corporation could not be confirmed as this story went to press.

Don Rumsfeld said yesterday that elections in "three-quarters or four-fifths of" Iraq might be good enough.

In other words, run the place on Florida rules.

The election summed up in one editorial cartoon.

A generous way to put it -- the lede of Dana Milbank's piece in tomorrow's Post: "President Bush and leading Republicans are increasingly charging that Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry and others in his party are giving comfort to terrorists and undermining the war in Iraq -- a line of attack that tests the conventional bounds of political rhetoric."

Can we re-check the sprinkler system in the Reichstag?

An amazing exchange from Jim Lehrer's interview this evening with Iyad Allawi, which opens and shuts the case on the latter's credibility about anything.

JIM LEHRER: What would you say to somebody in the United States who questions whether or not getting rid of Saddam Hussein was worth the cost of more than a thousand lives now and billions and billions of U.S. dollars?

PRIME MINISTER IYAD ALLAWI: Well, I assure you if Saddam was still there, terrorists will be hitting there again at Washington and New York, as they did in the murderous attack in September; they'll be hitting also on other places in Europe and the Middle East.

So, if we hadn't <$Ad$>invaded Iraq we'd be experiencing repeated 9/11s, with similar events in Europe in the Middle East.

Is it necessary to say that, despite all the bad things Iraq's Baathist regime represented and did, there is no evidence (pace Laurie Mylroie) that it ever attempted, let alone succeeded in mounting, any sort of terrorist attack on the American mainland?

Presumably the dramatic loss of credibility suffered if the US had failed to invade Iraq would have led to a sudden reversal of Baathist policy and a sudden unleashing of a wave of Mukabarat terrorist strikes on the American mainland.

Every so often you just have to sit back and marvel at the Twilight Zone we're living in at the moment.

Here we have a US-installed foreign head of state, whose travel schedule is determined by the US State Department, visiting the US to buoy the president's election campaign and spouting demonstrable lies in order to support a retrospective rationale for war that the White House wants Americans to believe but lacks the gall to state explicitly.

Look at this very odd article on MSNBC.com.

It's a Nightly News 'reality check' with the headline: "Violence surges even as conditions improve."

It reads like a classic example of the media's desire to find balance in cases where there really isn't any balance to be found.

The piece starts by noting Iraqis' skeptical reaction to Prime Minister Allawi's speech today, specifically with regard to the fight against the insurgency and how successful it's been.

"What he's saying isn't true. I can't even name an Iraqi city where there aren't clashes," says one Iraqi man-in-street.

The piece then goes on to describe the spiralling level of violence and the fact that insurgents are now increasingly targetting Iraqis themselves, which is presumably not an improvement, especially if you're Iraqi.

The reporter even notes that a good deal of reconstruction money has had to be diverted to security.

Then come the improvements. First there's a bulleted list of updates on reconstruction ...

Electricity: There is more than under Saddam but demand is up 80 percent, so it's still rationed — four hours on, two hours off.

Water: U.S. officials say there's no clean drinking water in all of Iraq because of sewage contamination.

Oil: The biggest problem is sabotage, keeping overall production short of the three million target, at 2.6 million barrels a day.

Jobs: A major improvement — one year ago, 60 percent of Iraqis were unemployed. Today, it's almost half that — 30-40 percent.

So there does seem to be more electricty. And unemployment has come down.

Or has it?

As it happens, in a piece in the Washington Post today, Jessica Matthews -- who knows a bit about these things -- says the Iraqi unemployment rate still "may be 60 percent."

And just a few days ago the AFP said that estimates of Iraqi unemployment range from 20% to 60%. So perhaps no one has any really good idea.

In any case, the reporter then notes these improvements ...

Iraqis no longer live under the oppressive scrutiny of Saddam's government. The giant busts that once adorned Saddam's palaces have been torn down like his regime — giving Iraqis something unquantifiable — their freedom.

Another freedom — the press. There are now about 200 independent newspapers; under Saddam there wasn't a single one.

Setting aside the sculptural improvements, freedom, or here more specifically the overthrow of a brutal authoritarian regime, is unquestionably a good thing. But you can't call this an 'improvement' in this context since Saddam's government was overthrown 18 months ago. And it's not clear that Iraqis have become more free since then.

'Freedom', at least at this level of abstraction, must be seen as a post-Saddam baseline.

In some measure they've probably become less free since creeping Islamization has reduced the rights of women in certain areas and brought de facto bans on drinking alcohol.

But the real point is that the unquestionable good of the end of a dictatorial government can't be pointed to as a sign that conditions are improving at the same time that violence surges, right?

Take a look at the piece yourself and tell me if the reporter doesn't struggle to find a single measure by which conditions in the country are improving or a single anecdote that would justify his headline.

This afternoon, after John Kerry said that Iyad Allawi was painting an overly rosy picture of the situation in Iraq, Dick Cheney said "John Kerry is trying to tear down all the good that has been accomplished, and his words are destructive to our effort in Iraq and in the global war on terror."

In other words, democracy in America is harmful to building democracy in Iraq.

Not that we really need to revisit this cudgel-issue of which candidate has more endorsements of foreign leaders, but on this issue pundits have shortchanged the incumbent.

Those who claim that Kerry has a lock on the support of foreign leaders have, rather unfairly, lumped all foreign leaders together into one pool, rather than dividing them into different subsets and weighting them accordingly. The issue is sort of like that raised by Ruy Teixeira about public opinion polls which have oversampled Republican voters.

If you take this more specific view, you see that among those foreign leaders President Bush has himself appointed to office his rate of support runs extremely high -- probably approaching 100%.

"Foreign terrorists are still pouring in, and they're <$NoAd$>trying to inflict damage on Iraq to undermine Iraq and to undermine the process, democratic process in Iraq, and, indeed, this is their last stand. So they are putting a very severe fight on Iraq. We are winning. We will continue to win, and we are going to prevail."

Iyad Allawi
Prime Minister of Iraq
September 19th, 2004
This Week, ABC NEWS

"Yes, the American troops have advanced further. This will only make it easier for us to defeat them."

Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf
(aka "Baghdad Bob")
former Iraqi Information Minister

[ed.note: I found the Sahaf quote on this famed Sahaf fan appreciation site. I tried to confirm it using Nexis. And I found several instances of it in reputable publications, such as the Times of London. But in each case these other publications seem to have sourced their usage to this same Sahaf fan website. So caveat lector. But you get the idea.]

Why so many fringy right-wing nutball sites on GoogleNews? J.D. Lasica reports so you can decide.

Talk about unorthodox.

A journalist -- Marc Sandalow, Washington Bureau Chief <$NoAd$>of the San Francisco Chronicle -- decided to discuss charges that John Kerry has waffled on Iraq policy by actually going back and reviewing his record as expressed in policy statements, speeches and votes.

Not surprisingly, he found Kerry has had pretty much the same position since the whole Iraq debate started ...

[A]n examination of Kerry's words in more than 200 speeches and statements, comments during candidate forums and answers to reporters' questions does not support the accusation [of flip-flopping]. As foreign policy emerged as a dominant issue in the Democratic primaries and later in the general election, Kerry clung to a nuanced, middle-of-the road -- yet largely consistent -- approach to Iraq ...

[T]aken as a whole, Kerry has offered the same message ever since talk of attacking Iraq became a national conversation more than two years ago.

Someone's got to talk to this Sandalow guy and straighten him out. Maybe someone from CNN?

"The path to our safety and to Iraq's future as a democratic nation lies in the resolute defense of freedom. If we stop fighting the terrorists in Iraq, they would be free to plot and plan attacks elsewhere, in America and other free nations. To retreat now would betray our mission, our word, and our friends."

That's President Bush from his appearance today with Prime Minister Allawi of Iraq.

Sentence one is certainly an arguable proposition and not without some merit, though it's bundled with so much rhetoricical mush as to have little concrete meaning. I think you can say the same thing for sentence three.

But surely sentence number two is pure foolishness. "If we stop fighting the terrorists in Iraq, they would be free to plot and plan attacks elsewhere, in America and other free nations."

Does anyone even possibly believe this is true? They're trapped in Iraq? We've got them pinned down so they can't hatch plots against US or European targets? 'The terrorists' are so busy with the insurgency in Iraq that they can't spare a few Mohammad Attas to blow stuff up over here?

Think about ...

Another poll, Fox News/Opinion Dynamics: Bush 45%, Kerry 43% among likely voters. And this is in line with other recent 'likely voter' poll numbers. Of the five soundings of likely voters from the last week, the most recent (albeit a Dem poll) had a tie. Before that there was one with a four point spread (NBC/WSJ), two with a three point spreads (Zogby and IBD) and another with a four point spread (GWU Battleground).

Is Prime Minister Allawi actually part of the Bush campaign? Or is he registered as a 527?

In Newsweek this afternoon, Mike Isikoff and Mark Hosenball have a piece that touches on the fact that the FBI still hasn't managed to interview Rocco Martino, the guy at the center of the forged Niger uranium documents story. They put the question to the FBI and were told by a "U.S. law-enforcement official ... [that] the FBI is seeking to interview Martino, but has not yet received permission to do so from the Italian government."

Please.

The Bureau may well be looking to interview Martino now that they've been put on the spot.

But are they really willing to take 'no' for an answer from the Italians?

And more to the point, if it's really a jurisdictional issue, why didn't they try to interview Martino last month when he was in New York?

Or if not then, how about when he flew here in June?

The White House is now saying that it's imperative to get to the bottom of who's behind the CBS Memo forgeries. And they're right. But the US government has never made any serious effort to find out who is behind the Niger uranium forgeries.

Why not?

The article in today's Post on the indictments of three top aides to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay mentions that one of them is John Colyandro, the executive director of DeLay's political action committee, Texans for a Republican Majority (aka TRMPAC -- an acronym which might perhaps be a subtle homage to DeLay's earlier partying days).

What it doesn't mention is that Colyandro is a one-time right-hand-shark to Karl Rove.

In fact Colyandro was at the center of one of Rove's uglier dirty-tricks from his Texas political days -- a story that is told in all its lizardly detail in a magazine article that's coming out about Rove next week.

Actually, after reading the article, you'll start to see that the whole Swift Boat business was pretty mild for what Rove is capable of.

If (or maybe 'when'?) he really wanted to lower the boom, or imitate past practice, we'd probably be hearing that Kerry was running his Swift Boat like an after-party for a Village People concert circa 1979. Or that when Kerry really wanted to party on the Delta he'd head to the local orphanage for a good time.

Surprise, surprise ...

"A year from now, I'll be very surprised if there is not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush."

Richard Perle
AEI Keynote speech
September 22, 2003

PS. Note of thanks to reader MW for the heads up.

PPS. This site seems to have had the quote up days ago, so credit where credit is due. They also have the sound clip for your listening pleasure.

In the final throes of a presidential campaign, the depth and breadth of a foreign policy debate are necessarily highly constricted. I am extremely pleased that John Kerry is now making the case against the President's Iraq policy in an aggressive and frontal fashion. But the thrust of that critique is inevitably on the policy's manifest failures rather than its intellectual and policy underpinnings.

A side note: It's revealing -- and the Kerry campaign should make something of it -- that whenever Kerry attacks Bush's management of the war all the Bush team can do is attack the alleged contradictions in Kerry's position on the war. That may work politically. But it's awfully telling. They have, quite literally, no response on the merits. Kerry should point that out and tell the president to stop making excuses for endangering the country.

In any case, back to the debate over foreign policy and war. If you're interested in getting more deeply into the questions raised by the Iraq war -- not WMD and troop strength, but the mix of empire, violence and democratic idealism -- I cannot recommend strongly enough John Judis' new book The Folly of Empire.

The book is half history, half polemic. Much of the historical focus is on America's experience as an incipient imperial power from the final years of the 19th century through the first two decades of the 20th century. The key events are the bloody war America fought to put down the Philipine rebellion and the ill-fated American intervention in Mexico. This Judis contrasts with a very different approach to foreign affairs that prevailed -- with relative consensus and consistency among presidents of both parties -- from Franklin Roosevelt until Bill Clinton. It was a model that in key ways grew out of the sobering experience of this imperialist interlude when America's deep-seated and in most ways benign missionizing impulses were wedded to the imperalism that would soon shake Europe, and much of the globe, to its foundations.

The image of Teddy Roosevelt that emerges from this book is very different from that which has been in vogue in recent years in Washington, DC. And in our current moment, when TR and Wilson loom so large in our historical imagination and disfigured latter-day versions of them direct our nation's affairs, it is an instructive examination of how the thirst for domination can masquerade as idealism, often in a toxic fashion fooling even itself.

With the US completely isolated and in a Mesopotamian snake pit, it's not hard to argue that President Bush's own special model of petulant unilateralism has been ineffective in securing American interests and security. But if you want to get more deeply into this -- how lessons of the past were ignored, how vacuous idealism can slide into hubris and then disaster -- this is the book.

Soon, another recommendation of a very different sort of book about empire: Hugh Thomas's new Rivers of Gold.

Front line in the war against terror ...

Today, according to the AP, Cat Stevens was "denied admission to the United States on national security grounds."

When Homeland Security officials found that Stevens -- who now goes by the name Yusuf Islam -- was flying on a plane from London to Washington, DC they diverted the plane to Bangor, Maine.

He was expelled from the US after a brief interview.