Successor to fired US Attorney John McKay sworn in in Washington state.

Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, former commander of US forces in Iraq. From Stars & Stripes …

The former top commander of U.S. troops in Iraq slammed the handling of the war and gave a bleak assessment of the current situation in Iraq.

“There is no question that America is living a nightmare with no end in sight,” retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez told a convention of military journalists on Friday.

…

But Sanchez reserved most of his venom Friday for U.S. officials, saying the U.S. government still has not brought all the resources needed to win in Iraq.

“From a catastrophically flawed, unrealistically optimistic war plan, to the administration’s latest surge strategy, this administration has failed to employ and synchronize the political, economic and military power,” Sanchez said.

Continuing changes to military strategy alone will not achieve victory, rather it will only “stave off defeat,” he said.

“The administration, Congress and the entire inter-agency, especially the State Department, must shoulder the responsibility for this catastrophic failure and the American people must hold them accountable.”

Following up on Josh’s item from last night, it’s worth taking a moment to consider how common the criticism of the White House’s Iraq policy has become among generals.

Retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who commanded U.S. forces in Iraq for a year after the March 2003 invasion, believes Iraq is a “nightmare,” with “no end in sight.” In today’s political climate, the White House and its allies usually dismiss critical assessments like this as “defeatist,” and borderline treason. Indeed, when Democratic members of Congress offer criticism nearly identical to Sanchez’s, the knee-jerk response from the right is that Dems are emboldening terrorists, undermining the troops, and putting the U.S. at risk.

But smearing generals like Sanchez is obvious more difficult. For one thing, supporters of the president’s Iraq policy have made it abundantly clear that questioning the judgment of U.S. generals is practically seditious.

For another, the “revolt of the generals” is surprisingly broad. It’s not as if Sanchez’s criticism is unusual — on the contrary, he’s the latest in a long line of leaders with stars on their shoulder to break with tradition and blast the Bush administration for its failures.

The generals acted independently, coming in their own ways to the agonizing decision to defy military tradition and publicly criticize the Bush administration over its conduct of the war in Iraq.

What might be called The Revolt of the Generals has rarely happened in the nation’s history.

In op-ed pieces, interviews and TV ads, more than 20 retired U.S. generals have broken ranks with the culture of salute and keep it in the family. Instead, they are criticizing the commander in chief and other top civilian leaders who led the nation into what the generals believe is a misbegotten and tragic war.

They can’t all be “phony soldiers,” can they?

Smearing 12-year-old Graeme Frost and his family was so last week. Are there any new targets for the far-right to attack? Catholics United, a left-leaning educational group, seems to be waving a red flag at the conservative bulls. (via DemFromCT)

Catholics United will launch a radio advertising campaign targeting ten members of Congress whose opposition to the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) have compromised their pro-life voting records.

The ads, which feature a mother urging her Congressional Representative to support SCHIP, will primarily air on Christian and talk radio stations from Monday Oct. 15 to Wednesday, Oct. 17 as Congress approaches a critical Oct. 18 vote to override President Bush’s veto of bipartisan SCHIP legislation.

The mother in the radio ad will say, “I’m the mother of three children, and I’m pro-life. I believe that protecting the lives our children must be our nation’s number one moral priority. That’s why I’m concerned that Congressman X says he’s pro-life but votes against health care for poor children. That’s not pro-life. That’s not pro-family. Tell Congressman X to vote for health care for children. Call him today at XXXX, that’s XXXXX.”

That’s a pretty good message, but I’m curious what conservatives might try to discredit this woman before people take her concerns seriously. My friend John Cole believes the far-right smear machine will clearly want to take a closer look at the voice in the ad.

Is she really a woman? What is her address and where can I find her house so I can drive by it? Does she really have three kids? … Is she really Catholic? Does she go to church? … Is she really pro-life? … And most important of all, what do her kitchen counters look like?

Note to the right: Cole is kidding. Please do not go after this woman.

Hillary Clinton appeared on MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” on Thursday, prompting CBS News to run a report on the interview. It included this jaw-dropper, by way of reader DOK:

During the twelve-minute interview, the former first lady chuckled in response to Olbermann. But she never unleashed the highly-scrutinized, overly-analyzed belly laugh known as “the cackle” that has been the focus of national media over the past few weeks. Which raises the question: Has the tightly-managed Clinton campaign put the kibosh on the cackle?

Yes, we’ve apparently reached a point in the media’s coverage of the campaign in which news outlets find it noteworthy when they don’t notice anything unusual about Sen. Clinton’s laugh.

As Greg Sargent put it, “We’ve come full circle: Damned if you do cackle; damned if you don’t.”

I was particularly fond of the way CBS tried to distance itself from its own report. The senator’s laugh, the report said, is “overly analyzed.” Apparently, it’s so excessive that CBS finds it necessary to note its absence.

In related news, Rudy Giuliani delivered a speech yesterday in which he didn’t answer his cell phone; Mitt Romney answered questions without abandoning a position he held five minutes prior; John McCain hosted a town-hall forum in which he did not refer to anyone as a “little jerk”; and Fred Thompson went the whole day without responding to a reporter’s question with, “I don’t know anything about that.”

Earlier this week, the Rocky Mountain News broke word that Joseph P. Nacchio, the former CEO of Qwest, has accused the National Security Agency of retaliating against his company because he refused to cooperate with a domestic-spying scheme.

The WaPo moved the ball forward today, with a solid front-page piece. The key point to take away from the story, however, is the timing.

Nacchio’s account, which places the NSA proposal at a meeting on Feb. 27, 2001, suggests that the Bush administration was seeking to enlist telecommunications firms in programs without court oversight before the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon. The Sept. 11 attacks have been cited by the government as the main impetus for its warrantless surveillance efforts.

It’s almost as if the Bush gang, almost immediately after taking office, began a legally-dubious power grab that included warrantless-domestic spying.

I suppose some of the president’s allies might be tempted to spin this as encouraging. If the administration was pressuring telecoms as far back as Feb. 2001, the president and his team were taking the terrorist threat seriously long before 9/11.

This might be more persuasive if, six months after the NSA allegedly leaned on Qwest, the president didn’t blow off a certain Presidential Daily Briefing, telling his CIA briefer, “All right. You’ve covered your ass, now.”

As conservative apoplexy over Al Gore’s earned honors continues, there are two terrific op-eds today that explain the former Vice President’s fortunes in a broader context.

First up is Jonathan Chait, who explains that the right loathes Gore, in part because he’s the “anti-Bush.”

You might wonder why they care so much — Gore, after all, is obviously not going to run for president, and even some conservatives now concede that global warming is real. The answer is that Gore’s triumph is a measure of George W. Bush’s disrepute.

Indeed, in the political culture, Gore’s role is as a negative indicator of the president’s standing. For all the talk of a “new Al Gore,” there’s nothing new about the man. His public reputation is almost entirely a function of Bush’s. […]

The defensiveness of Gore’s critics comes because he is the ultimate rebuke to Bush. Gore, obviously, is the great historic counter-factual, the man who would have been president if Florida had a functioning ballot system. More than that, he is the anti-Bush. He is intellectual and introverted, while Bush is simplistic and backslapping.

I think that’s right. When Bush’s popularity soared, Gore’s reputation was the subject of ridicule. When Bush was exposed as a fraud and a failure, it was Gore’s assessments that, upon reflection, proved to be true.

And then there’s the NYT’s Bob Herbert considers Bush v. Gore, redux.

Mr. Bush came to mind because, for all of the obvious vulnerabilities he exhibited in 2000, it was not him but Mr. Gore who was mocked unmercifully by the national media. And the mockery had nothing to do with the former vice president’s positions on important policy issues. He was mocked because of his personality.

In the race for the highest office in the land, we showed the collective maturity of 3-year-olds.

Mr. Gore was taken to task for his taste in clothing and for such grievous offenses as sighing or, allegedly, rolling his eyes. It was a given that at a barbecue everyone would rush to be with his opponent.

We’ve paid a heavy price. The president who got such high marks as a barbecue companion doesn’t seem to know up from down. He’s hurled the nation into a ruinous war that has cost countless lives and spawned a whole new generation of terrorists. He continues to sit idly by as a historic American city, New Orleans, remains wounded and on its knees. He’s blithely steered the nation into a bottomless pit of debt.

Gore told Herbert, “What politics has become requires a level of tolerance for triviality and artifice and nonsense that I have found in short supply.”

The irony of the last couple of weeks is that the debate over the State’s Children’s Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP) was supposed to be one of the easy ones. Way back in July, the WaPo’s Christopher Lee noted, “If anything looked like a sure thing in the new Congress, it was that lawmakers would renew, and probably expand, the popular, decade-old State Children’s Health Insurance Program before it expires this year.”

It was a no-brainer. Dems and Republicans reached a compromise version, which drew praise from governors, the medical community, and children’s advocates. Of all the bills likely to spark a political war, this was going to be at the bottom of the list.

And yet, here we are. S-CHIP garnered an inexplicable veto, the right is smearing a 12-year-old kid and his family, and Republicans on the Energy and Commerce Committee are issuing breathtaking press releases like this one.

Republican Senate hopeful Montgomery Burns today joined with Mayor Joe Quimby, D-Springfield, to support the Senate’s gazillion-dollar SCHIP bill.

“If the poor children can get a piece of the action, why can’t I?” explained Burns at a MoveOn.org rally in Capital City. “The little darlings are needy? Me, too. I need somebody to pay. Quimby here says he knows a bunch of low-income nobodies who are ripe for the picking. Excellent.”

“You need this?” wondered the mayor. “Well, why not. I’ve got needs, too. Why, I’ve got 27 paternity suits pending and to quote the Speaker, ‘suffer the little children.’ The Quimby Compound is overflowing with those little sufferers. Vote Quimby.”

It actually gets worse from there, including multiple references to MoveOn.org and “rental children.”

Bill Scher speculates that maybe the Energy and Commerce Committee GOP’s site got hacked, which seems reasonable given that committee staffers usually don’t go out of their way to appear this foolish on purpose.

I genuinely believe Condoleezza Rice has no idea why so many of us would find this ironic.

The Russian government under Vladimir Putin has amassed so much central authority that the power-grab may undermine Moscow’s commitment to democracy, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Saturday.

“In any country, if you don’t have countervailing institutions, the power of any one president is problematic for democratic development,” Rice told reporters after meeting with human-rights activists.

“I think there is too much concentration of power in the Kremlin. I have told the Russians that. Everybody has doubts about the full independence of the judiciary. There are clearly questions about the independence of the electronic media and there are, I think, questions about the strength of the Duma,” said Rice, referring to the Russian parliament.

According to the AP report, Rice also told the human-rights activists that democratic institutions are the keys to combating arbitrary power from the state.

On a more serious point, McClatchy’s Jonathan Landay has a report on how the Bush administration’s policy towards Russia has been ineffective and based on faulty assumptions from the outset.

The piece quotes Michael McFaul of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, hardly a progressive outlet, explaining that Bush and his foreign policy team “grossly misjudged Putin,” considering him “a good guy and one of us.”

One of my favorite moments from the six Republican debates thus far came in May, when Mitt Romney tried to explain how he perceives threats to the U.S. from the Middle East: “This is about Shi’a and Sunni. This is about Hezbollah and Hamas and al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. This is the worldwide jihadist effort to try and cause the collapse of all moderate Islamic governments and replace them with a caliphate. They also probably want to bring down the United States of America.”

The answer drew praise — ABC News’ The Note touted how impressive it was — but Romney’s take didn’t make a lot of sense. Romney was articulating a national security strategy that conflates groups, sects, and agendas that have nothing to do with one another — but he was saying it in such a way as to make it sound like he was informed.

It’s exactly this kind of thinking that led to this ad, which may very well be the single dumbest campaign commercial of the year, at least so far.

It’s a bit like the remarks from the debate in May — Romney tries to come across as knowledgeable, but ends up not making any sense at all.

Glenn Greenwald recently explained that some portions of the conservative movement are genuinely convinced that we’re this close to a global Islamic theocracy. It’s absurd — as Yglesias noted, “The idea that we should be laying awake at night afraid that a group of at most several thousand people who control almost no territory or valuable military equipment might establish a universal caliphate or ‘collapse freedom loving nations like us’ is ridiculous.” And yet, that’s the basis for a campaign ad from a top-tier Republican candidate.

Indeed, notice the ad talks about terrorists “collaps[ing] freedom-loving nations” like the U.S. How is that even possible? Romney doesn’t say, but if we vote for him, he’ll prevent it. Please.

And what does this have to do with Iran? Nothing, but Iran is in the Middle East, and when trying to sucker the far-right GOP base, that’s all that matters.

As Kevin Drum noted, there’s nothing serious about this style of campaigning: “There are no actual proposals or serious thoughts here. It’s just a puerile contest to see who can stuff the most World War IV bullets into a single 30-second spot.”