There's been a lot of speculation about just what Mr. Sulzberger must have been thinking adding William Kristol to his stable of opinion columnists at The New York Times. Yes, Kristol's on record saying the paper should be prosecuted for its reporting on the warrant-less wiretapping program. And some of his predictions have not panned out.

But the weirdest thing about the choice is that Sulzberger and Co. have failed to grasp the taxonomy of the neoconservative literary cartel. David Brooks is the house-broken William Kristol, the cadre tasked with operating just behind enemy lines, or at least in the no-man's-land where only a kinder gentler version of the faith can be propounded. And they already have him.

So why you'd want both Kristol and Brooks on staff is a question that simply has no logical answer unless they got some sort of two for one deal or other kind of group discount.

Camp Rudy considers canning campaign surrogate who says Rudy will send the Muslims back to their caves.

I've written a lot today on this question of how Benazir Bhutto died. So let me add to the discussion the latest I've read. Earlier today, when the Pakistani government suggested that Bhutto sustained her fatal injury in the process of ducking out of the way of gunfire, I asked why these statements seemed to discount what seemed like a more plausible scenario -- the head injury was the result not of her ducking but the force of the explosion pushing her into something.

Carlotta Gall's report is now out in the Times and her report suggests that this is what the government is saying ...

With many of Ms. Bhutto’s supporters openly blaming the government for her death, the Interior Ministry made the surprising announcement that Ms. Bhutto had died not from gunshots or shrapnel but from a skull fracture when she was thrown by the force of the suicide bomb and hit her head on a lever of the sunroof of the car in which she was riding.

Whether this is true or not, it at least sounds much more plausible. Whether this is a revised version of the story or whether the earlier accounts were garbled accounts of the government story is not clear to me at this point.

I've been knocking for most of the day on these weird inconsistencies emerging in the accounts of the death of Benazir Bhutto; and now the biggs seem to be digging deeper. A number of clinicians who've written in today have said the government's story -- that Bhutto died because she basically knocked her head on the car sun roof while ducking to avoid the bullets -- is deeply implausible. A number of reasons are given, the most common of which is that you would have great difficulty generating enough force to inflict the kind of injury that would lead to death so quickly.

But when you step back and look at the constantly changing and mainly contradictory stories, you have to say, to what end? Other than a lot of confusion and irresponsible statements, what's the point of the different stories? Perhaps there's none. But the oddity of the final account -- that in so many words she died of a self-inflicted head injury when trying to duck gunfire -- comes not only from its improbability but from the level of detail.

The idea here, remember, is that you have a very chaotic and rapid chain of events that leaves Bhutto pronounced dead in less than an hour after the first shots were fired. With no post-mortem, which would seem necessary to conclusively identify the cause of death as this sort of head injury, they not only pronounce on the cause of death but even describe in some detail just how she came to have the head injury -- a blow to the head while trying to get away from gunfire.

To put it plainly, it simply seems incredible to me that they could have any real sense of how she got the head injury, even if they could establish, absent any clear evidence, that that was the cause of death.

And this suspicion is, I think, added to by the named accounts of doctors who actually treated her. This is from a late report from CNN ...

Dr. Mussadiq Khan of Rawalpindi General Hospital, who treated Bhutto before she was declared dead, said she had "a big wound" on the side of her head "that usually occurs when something big, with a lot of speed, hits that area."

The key details are there, something big at high speed. I guess 'big' is relative in this context, but that sounds a lot like she got shot or hit by a bomb fragment. And frankly, how likely is it that someone shoots at you several times at point blank range, near so (the video suggests no more than ten feet), and then detonates a bomb a few feet away from you and a few minutes later you're dead and it has nothing to do with either of those things?

I'd say, not likely.

But again, why?

From the current CNN headline story, I've seen what strikes me as the first explanation that makes sense of all facts ...

CNN national security analyst Ken Robinson, who worked in U.S. intelligence in Pakistan during the Clinton administration, said he suspects Bhutto's enemies are attempting to control her legacy by minimizing the attack's role in her demise.

"They're trying to deny her a martyr's death, and in Islam, that's pretty important," Robinson said.

Bhutto, he said, threatens to become more influential in death than she was in life. "Her torch burns bright now forever. She's forever young; she's forever brave, challenging against all odds the party in power and challenging the military and Islamic extremism."

Obviously, I have no idea beyond Robinson's surmise. But in a case like this I find myself looking for some explanation that makes sense of the seemingly nonsensical data. And this makes sense. The bonk on the head theory is ridiculous on many levels, not simply on that of implausibility, but because it makes her a potential object of ridicule, mockery and the manner of her death somehow ignoble. That would be a pretty harsh take, certainly; but they seem to play pretty rough over there.

For my money, if she happened to die in such a freakish manner in the process of an assassination attempt, it wouldn't diminish her heroism or bravery. But I would imagine many would see her death as tied in some way to cowardice and diminish, as Robinson says, any sense of her as a martyr.

Pinch Sulzberger taps Bill Kristol to write a weekly column for the New York Times.

As promised, we have more of Greg Sargent's interview with John Deady, the co-chair of Veterans for Rudy in New Hampshire.

Greg asked Deady if he stood by his Muslim-bashing remarks recorded on video by the Guardian:

"I most assuredly do. I've been very concerned about this Muslim thing for quite awhile. The average American does not know beans about what the Muslims are about. I am talking about the Muslims in general. I don't subscribe to the principle that there are good Muslims and bad Muslims. They're all Muslims."

The rest of Greg's report is here.

I've said a lot about how well-positioned Mitt Romney still looks to take it all, even with all the problems he's having in Iowa and New Hampshire, the two states that were supposed to nail down the nomination for him. But at Huffpo, Tom Edsall's got a pretty solid contrary argument. Mitt's spent well over $80 million this year on this campaign and he's still falling fast (at least in relative terms) in both key states.

William Hartung argues that the U.S. should put a hold on military aid to Pakistan until Musharraf follows through on his pledge to hold legitimate elections.

TPM DR Reader FP ...

As a physician, I agree that a bullet to the neck looks a lot different than a skull fracture. But there are several caveats. When a trauma victim comes into the ER, you tend to believe the story you're told as long as it's generally consistent with what you're seeing. In Bhutto's case, I assume someone said something along the lines of, "There was gunfire and then a bomb." That's broadly believable. If there are inconsistencies in the story, you usually don't start asking questions until the patient has been stabilized. (You see this a lot in child abuse cases. The story will be something like, "He fell off his bike." Your first task is to make sure the kid's okay. There's no reason to question the story until the radiologist calls and says, "There's no way this fracture was caused by a fall.") In Bhutto's case, she died less than an hour after coming in. Once the patient is dead, you usually stop asking questions, and the case goes to the medical examiner and possibly the police. The story I heard is that her husband didn't want an autopsy, so the body was released without one. That probably wouldn't happen here, but we're talking about Pakistan, and I'd guess that the authorities would do whatever her husband asked.

The other big thing to think about is where the information is coming from. I don't know what the ethics rules are in Pakistan, but in the US, you can't give out ANY information about a patient without some sort of consent. As far as I can tell, none of the information here is coming from Bhutto's doctors. Doctors can't just call a press conference to talk about their patients, even if there are news stories out there that are wildly inaccurate.

TPM DR Reader DS ...

Cardiac arrest from a head injury would require sufficient internal bleeding to cause pressure on the brainstem. I have a hard time accepting that a self-inflicted, "if only she had stayed in the vehicle" kind of injury would generate that level of intracranial bleeding, certainly that quickly. If they attribute the head injury to concussive force from the blast, it is implausible to me that she would have lacked shrapnel injury; either the armored vehicle shielded her or it didn't, but it wouldn't do so selectively. To my ears, the whole thing sounds like the Pakistani government deflecting blame for the attack by saying her death was her own damn fault. I find the lack of a post-mortem troubling, and will have a hard time believing any kind of official pronouncements on the subject.

TPM DR Reader DS (another DS) ...

I am not a forensic pathologist, and so my opinions should be taken with something of a grain of salt. However, as a pediatrician, I see a fair amount of head injuries, both acutely and in follow-up. I find the explanations coming from Pakistan regarding the mechanism of Bhutto's demise to be unconvincing, to say the least. If they are positing that Ms. Bhutto died from an essentially self-inflicted injury while ducking, I find that contention absurd. It is implausible in the extreme that she would have generated sufficient velocity in ducking that short distance to sustain a skull fracture, much less a fatal head injury that would have prevented emergent resuscitation. And yes, any reasonably competent physician would be able to distinguish between a gunshot wound, a shrapnel injury and a skull fracture, open or closed. Further, if no post-mortem was done, it is essentially impossible for them to attribute the cause of death to a head injury, unless it was an open head injury. Traumatic brain injury as a cause of death cannot be effectively diagnosed by visual inspection alone. If an open head injury is supposedly the cause of death, shrapnel is a much more likely cause of the injury than ducking. I find their explanation patently preposterous.

Having read through a number of educated and/or expert responses, and taken them in through the prism of my medical ignorance, a few points jump out at me. The first is that we haven't heard anything from a doctor who was actually there, which is key. We've heard things from government officials who at various points had strong interests in getting some information out quickly or exculpating security or inculpating different possible assailants. Second, in the chaos of a very high-pressure and grave medical emergency there are probably all sorts of misunderstandings and misdiagnoses that were possible.

The key to me is that it's very hard to see how the knowledge of the cause of death improved after she died if there was no post-mortem examination of the body. Indeed, given the chaos of the situation and the lack of a post-mortem, it's difficult to see how how a closed head injury as the cause of death was confirmed and, even odder to me, how the authorities could have isolated such a precise explanation of the injury. You have gunshots, a major explosion and then lots of chaos afterwards, and without a post-mortem examination you're able to determine that the cause of death was a head injury sustained when the vehicle lurched down from the gunfire and inadvertently struck her head on the sunroof?

Let me be clear: I'm not alleging a conspiracy here or that she didn't die in one fashion or another because of an assailant who approached her vehicle, fired a gun and blew himself up. But we do seem to be getting explanations that are either very contradictory or are explanations that the authorities in question probably can't know. With no post-mortem examination and the body already in the grave, it seems increasingly unlikely we ever will.

A Giuliani campaign official in New Hampshire is busted on camera touting Rudy as the guy to send all the Muslims back to their caves.

Late Update: Greg Sargent just interviewed the guy. He is John Deady, the co-chair of Veterans for Rudy in New Hampshire, and he is not backing off his original comments, telling Greg: "I don't subscribe to the principle that there are good Muslims and bad Muslims. They're all Muslims."

We'll have more from Greg's interview shortly.

Larry Johnson: So al Qaeda killed Bhutto?

Initial reports from Pakistani government officials ascribed the death of Benazir Bhutto to a gunshot wound fired by the assailant before he detonated his suicide bomb. Subsequent reports today say that it was not a bullet wound but rather shrapnel from the bomb.

A fired bullet can be badly disfigured. So probably only an expert can reliably distinguish one from the other. And thus that confusion is not surprising.

Yet now the Pakistani Interior Ministry is reporting that Bhutto died neither from a gunshot wound or shrapnel but rather from a blow to the head (causing a fractured skull) she suffered while ducking down into the car she was riding in to escape the gunfire.

Early reports of chaotic events are often garbled and inaccurate. But my strong impression is that to a competently trained physician a skull fracture looks very different than bullet wound to the neck. And the credibility or at least reliability of this latest explanation is undermined by the fact that there was apparently no post-mortem conducted on the body.

I don't know what it means or what purpose the shifting explanations might serve. Perhaps, as I said, they are simply progressively more accurate accounts provided as the chaos of the initial moments fades and more details can be ascertained. But I think at this point it's worth making a public note that this is starting to sound fishy and probably deserves more scrutiny.

(ed.note: I would be interested to hear from any doctors, EMTs or forensic examiners who might be able to shed more light on this. What the government accounts seem to discount is what I would imagine would be a more plausible explanation, that the force of the explosion led to a fatal head injury.)

There are a bunch of news items coming down the pike, sourced in one fashion or another to the Pakistani government, saying that al Qaeda has taken responsibility for Bhutto's killing. It's entirely possible that it was al Qaeda, or one of its incarnations. But let's keep in mind that it is strongly in the interests of the Pakistani government for the crime to be blamed on al Qaeda. And the Pakistani government isn't the most reliable source.

Who assassinated Benazir Bhutto?

A little more detail on that LA Times poll.

Yesterday we brought you news of the new poll out from the LA Times and Bloomberg. The headline was a virtual dead-heat on the Democratic side in both New Hampshire and Iowa.

But there's a bit more there in the details about Iowa. And here it gets a touch technical.

In Iowa the numbers for Democrats who plan to attend the caucuses is Clinton (29%), Obama (26%), Edwards (25%). With the 4% margin of error, that's basically a tie.

In yesterday's LA Times article it gave a separate set of numbers for "voters who said they are certain or very likely to actually participate in the Iowa caucuses." 'Very likely voters' is usually such a tight 'screen' that we somewhat discounted these results, which are better for both Clinton and Edwards. They're Clinton (31%), Edwards (25%) and Obama (22%). The same applies even more to 'certain'. And the more respondents you screen out, the higher the margin of error becomes.

But when we looked this morning at the actual poll internals it just says 'likely voters'. The Times article was also revised to remove 'certain'.

These may seem like small semantic points but they suggest significantly different ways of interpreting the numbers.

In any case, the upshot is that based on what we know now, we'd give more weight to the likely voter number. It's still pretty much anyone's game, but the news is better for Clinton than we'd thought, and at least indirectly better for Edwards too.

Looking at these latest numbers from the LA Times poll (noted below), and the context of other polls over the last few weeks, I think you have to say that none of the three competitive campaigns on the Democratic side can go into the next two weeks with any real confidence or even relative certainty of the result.

Even John Edwards, who in my own mind I'd pushed into a second tier, is by no means out of this. He's in third in Iowa. But only a statistically insignificant margin, 4 percentage points, separates him from the leader, Hillary Clinton. And what 2004 showed in spades is that an unexpected win in Iowa can rocket a candidate into the lead in New Hampshire. Possibly even more so this time since a mere five days separates the two contests.

Of course, another possibility is that they remained bunched but in an unexpected order -- Obama, Edwards, Clinton or Clinton, Edwards, Obama.

There's some thin reassurance for Hillary in the LAT sounding: among Iowans who are certain or very likely to participate in the Iowa caucuses she leads by 9 points. But if I were Hillary's field director in either of the two states that would not settle my stomach much.

A new LA Times poll shows Barack Obama (32%) in a statistical dead heat with Hillary Clinton (30%), with Edwards a distant third (18%). In Iowa, it's a three-way dead heat, at least when margins of error are factored in: Clinton (29%), Obama (26%), Edwards (25%).

Edwards chats with Musharraf after Bhutto killing.

We've got four days left of 2007 and six days left until the Iowa Caucuses. We survey the terrain in our sixth 2008 election roundup episode of TPMtv ...

Watch this episode on Blip.