Mark Schmitt is pointing our attention exactly where it should be: Be warned. The White House is now telling us that engineering a confrontation with Iran is a key part of their plan to resuscitate the president’s dismal approval ratings in time to survive election day.

And this is probably as good a time as any to address the question we hear more and more from Democrats: how do we prepare for whatever it is Karl Rove has cooked up this election season? How do Democrats or this or that Democratic candidate ‘inoculate’ themselves from this year’s version of the Swift Boat scam?

With respect, this is loser talk. The ‘how will we defend ourselves’ conversation is an example of the malady itself masquerading as the cure to the disease.

On a battlefield there is a name for armies that spend all their time and energy planning and conditioning themselves to defend against their opponents’ attacks. They’re called defeated armies. You defend yourself when and where you must. But you do everything you can to maintain the initiative. And that pretty much always means bringing the attack to the other side.

This isn’t just a good way to win political fights. It’s also a window into the meta-message that often makes Republican attack politics so damaging for Democrats. If you think back to the Swift Boat debacle of 2004, the surface issue was John Kerry’s honesty and bravery as a sailor in Vietnam. Far more powerful, however, was the meta-message: George Bush slaps John Kerry around and Kerry either can’t or won’t hit back. For voters concerned with security and the toughness of their leaders, that’s a devastating message — and one that has little or nothing to do with the truth of the surface charges. Someone who can’t fight for himself certainly can’t fight for you. At the time I called it the “Republicans’ bitch-slap theory of electoral politics.”

With respect to what’s coming on Iran, what is in order is a little honesty, just as was the case with the Social Security debate a year ago. The only crisis with Iran is the crisis with the president’s public approval ratings. Period. End of story. The Iranians are years, probably as long as a decade away, and possibly even longer from creating even a limited yield nuclear weapon. Ergo, the only reason to ramp up a confrontation now is to help the president’s poll numbers.

This is a powerful message because it is an accurate message. We have many challenges overseas today. Chief among them, as one of the Democrats’ senate candidates puts it, is “refocusing America’s foreign and defense policies in a way that truly protects our national interests and seeks harmony where they are not threatened.” The period of peril the country is entering into isn’t tied to an Iranian bomb. It turns on how far a desperate president will go to avoid losing control of Congress.

Go to his heart. Go to his weaknesses. Though the realization of the fact is something of a lagging indicator, the man is a laughing stock, whose lies and failures are all catching up with him.

To the president the Democrats should be saying, Double or Nothing is Not a Foreign Policy.

The great bulk of the public doesn’t believe this president any more when he tries to gin up a phony crisis. They don’t believe he’d have much of an idea of how to deal with a real one. Enough of the lies. Enough of the incompetence and failure.

No buying into another of the president’s phony crises.

Some of the most exciting projects we (and I mean, TPM and a large group of regular readers) have done over the years would never have been possible without the Internet’s distributed communication tools and the various fee-based (Nexis) and public databases (google, fec.gov) we’d never have ready access to with the Net. Add all that social networking and information together and you get a big leap forward in what you can find out and what you can do about it.

It’s easy to forget the remarkable amount of information on campaign money available at your fingertips through sites like fec.gov or opensecrets.org. But hard money contributions only scratch the surface of what you need to know. You could do so much more if more infromation were so easily accessible and even more if there were better ways to get the different collections of data to, shall we say, talk to each other. Some’s in VHS, other in Betamax, still others in DVD, and of course a lot is just on paper. Not literally, but you get the idea — too many ways of packaging and slicing and dicing the info and no one place or standard for accessing all of it together.

Just for example, some very interesting patterns would pop out if you could cross-tabulate campaign contributions with government contracts. Toss in travel records and lobbying expenditures and it would be even better. (It is a rarefied temptation, I grant you. But presumably more than a few of this site’s readers have the addiction.)

In one example I always come back to, all Marcus Stern did to break open the Duke Cunningham story was look at the records of his home sale and then match the buyer up with Duke’s earmarking largesse. It was sitting there in plain sight. Someone just had to know where to look.

Anyway, getting all this information out there and more, shall we say, google-able, is a task that takes a lot of resources and organizational heft. On the social networking level this is some of what we’ve been trying to do with TPM and TPMCafe’s Auction House which evolved into TPMmuckraker.com. But a whole lot more resources and organizational work and tech know-how would be necessary to really make it happen — to get the data online and query-able in an organized way.. And that’s what Ellen Miller is now doing at the Sunlight Foundation, which just launched last week.

Ellen has a post over at her Sunlight blog about what they’re trying to do. So if this sort of reformist sleuthing interests you go take a look at what Ellen and the Sunlight crew are planning, and get involved.

Clear the decks and watch for flying objects. We’re discussing David Sirota’s new book Hostile Takeover this week at TPMCafe Bookclub. Here’s David’s first post.

Rep. John Sweeney (R-NY) fights back against those vicious rumor-mongers at Union College’s Alpha Delta Phi – he wasn’t drunk at all, he says, when he showed up at their party. That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.

Yes, three years ago today, President Bush declared Mission Accomplished in Iraq.

I think this will go down as the symbol of the Bush administration — like Carter’s malaise speech, Bush’s father with the carton of milk, LBJ falling on his metaphorical sword in a nationally televised address. It captures everything. The arrogance. The dingbat personality cult. The fleeting triumph of Potemkin stagecraft over tangible accomplishment. The happy willingness to let others take care of the president’s messes.

Today the president hailed yet another “turning point” in Iraq but warned of “more tough days ahead.”

Rep. Sweeney responds to charges he was partying like it was 1999.

TPM Reader RS checks in: “It’s been interesting to observe the virtual news blackout of Stephen Colbert’s remarks at the Correspondent’s dinner. Particularly since I seem to recall that when Don Imus went after Bill Clinton in a similar setting at the height of the Lewinsky scandal, it was major news.”

Update: You can read a transcript of Colbert’s routine here.

How many times did Jack Abramoff visit the White House? The White House did their best to prevent anyone from knowing. But now we’ll find out.

Last week, CIA Director Porter Goss denied partying with crooked defense/intelligence contractor Brent Wilkes, who prosecutors believe procured prostitutes to entertain his business associates. Now, three more congressmen with close ties to Wilkes have denied attending Wilkes’ parties.

Wow. I haven’t been following the ins and outs of the Net Neutrality debate on the web that closely. But Mike McCurry must have been seriously traumatized by the back and forth to have come up with this post.