It looks like the Republicans have settled on a talking point.

A GOP leader Sunday denied a double standard in pushing Sen. Larry Craig to resign after a sex sting guilty plea, while remaining silent over GOP Sen. David Vitter’s involvement with an escort service.

A senior Democrat said a double standard by Republican leaders is exactly what occurred.

Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., the Senate Republican campaign chairman, said Craig “admitted guilt. That is a big difference between being accused of something and actually admitting guilt.”

While Ensign was repeating the line on ABC, Ed Gillespie, White House counselor and a former chairman of the Republican Party, was on Fox News making the same argument. “The fact is that Sen. Craig pled guilty to a crime, and therefore was convicted of a crime,” Gillespie said. “Sen. Vitter has not been charged with a crime, let alone convicted of one. So there’s a pretty big distinction here.”

This may not be wisest strategy. For one thing, confronted with evidence that he made use of a prostitution service, Vitter conceded immediately that he’d “sinned.” I’m not an expert in the subject, but as I understand it, paying for sex is a crime, and Vitter publicly acknowledged that he’d violated this law. He would have been subject to criminal charges, but the statute of limitations ran out. For the GOP, that makes the “pretty big distinction” fairly small — Craig pleaded guilty to a recent crime, Vitter admitted guilt of a less recent crime.

Moreover, the whole argument seems premised on strained legalisms. Remember when the president urged Republicans to hold themselves to the highest moral standard? “We must always ask ourselves not only what is legal, but what is right,” Bush said in 2001. “There is no goal of government worth accomplishing if it cannot be accomplished with integrity.”

So much for that idea.

For all the debate this week about civilian casualities and sectarian violence in Iraq, Newsweek’s Babak Dehghanpisheh and Larry Kaplow provide some often overlooked context.

Thousands of other Sunnis like Kamal have been cleared out of the western half of Baghdad, which they once dominated, in recent months. The surge of U.S. troops—meant in part to halt the sectarian cleansing of the Iraqi capital—has hardly stemmed the problem. The number of Iraqi civilians killed in July was slightly higher than in February, when the surge began. According to the Iraqi Red Crescent, the number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) has more than doubled to 1.1 million since the beginning of the year, nearly 200,000 of those in Baghdad governorate alone. Rafiq Tschannen, chief of the Iraq mission for the International Organization for Migration, says that the fighting that accompanied the influx of U.S. troops actually “has increased the IDPs to some extent.”

When Gen. David Petraeus goes before Congress next week to report on the progress of the surge, he may cite a decline in insurgent attacks in Baghdad as one marker of success. In fact, part of the reason behind the decline is how far the Shiite militias’ cleansing of Baghdad has progressed: they’ve essentially won.

As Matt Yglesias added, “Maybe Bush can change his line to the idea that if we just keep staying the course for 4 or 5 more years, casualties will drop massively because everyone will already be dead or displaced. Or maybe someone can explain to me again about how we can’t leave Iraq because of the ethnic cleansing that’ll happen without us around.”

This week at TPMCafe we’ll be hosting the first week of a month of great Book Clubs. Getting things started: Todd Gitlin’s The Bulldozer and the Big Tent: Blind Republicans, Lame Democrats, and the Recovery of American Ideals.

In the book, Gitlin offers a landscape view of the Bush years and argues that liberals need a “big tent” Democratic Party to counter the bulldozer GOP. Gitlin explains in his introductory post:

The Democrats have no choice but to remain a big-tent party. The Republicans made the mistake of turning themselves into a bulldozer party, but they couldn’t bulldoze reality fast enough to keep from falling into a ditch. Now, if we don’t blow it, there’s a new center of gravity coming into American politics—not a flabby center of splitting differences, not a blah-blah of bipartisanship, but a new story and replenished values.

Read Gitlin’s full post for more, and check in all week at the Book Club for an all-star discussion with Digby, Matt Yglesias, Heather Booth, Ed Kilgore, Mark Schmitt and our very own Josh Marshall.

In last Thursday’s episode of TPMtv we explored the striking disparity in the number of scandal and muck cases between Democrats and Republicans. The GOP continues its dizzying dominance in the category, extraordinary considering its minority status in congress. After receiving a welter of viewer mail about the names we included on our list we take a moment in today’s episode of TPMtv to elucidate our methodology and even add a couple names we missed the first go around …

Fred Thompson advisor Mary Matalin explains why Thompson is skipping a debate to appear on Jay Leno: More people will be watching Jay Leno. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Labor Day Roundup.

Even with the power of propaganda and a befuddled media, it amazes me that we can be going into a major military policy debate with so little clarity on a few basic statistics upon which much of the debate is going to turn.

Are military deaths up or down? Are Iraqi civilian deaths up or down?

‘Success’ and ‘failure’ are quite subjective and they may be judged on various criteria. But these numbers, even if they don’t tell the whole story, are concrete and readily ascertainable — at least in the case of military deaths.

Here for instance is a post at DailyKos referencing an exchange between CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and Rep. Charles Boustany (R-LA). The congressman rattles off a series of statistics from the approved Republican talking points about declining numbers of casualties. And Blitzer runs down the list demonstrating pretty clearly that Boustany’s numbers — and thus the numbers pretty much all president’s supporters are dishing — are simply false on their face.

So here we have that classic sort of modern media moment in which we have a debate wherein both sides arguments are fairly and equally represented — one side with a series of bogus ‘facts’ and another with actual facts. Both sides get to make their case. And you can decide between them.

I actually got to thinking about this a couple days ago when I read this article on the McClatchy newswire. The headline reads

“U.S. combat deaths drop by half during ‘surge'”

The article begins …

U.S. combat deaths in Iraq have dropped by half in the three months since the buildup of 28,000 additional troops reached full strength, surprising analysts.

U.S. officials had predicted the increase would lead to higher American casualties as the troops “took the fight to the enemy.” But that hasn’t happened, even though U.S. forces have launched major offensives north and south of Baghdad.

This seemed a little different than what I’d heard. So I went and looked at icasualties.org, the site that keeps track of these numbers and, as far as I know, is widely respected in terms of its statistics.

And here are the numbers they show going back to January …

August &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp 82
July &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp 79
June &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp 101
May &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp 126
April &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp 104
March &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp 81
February &nbsp 81
January &nbsp&nbsp 83

Now, nowhere in the article did I see a specific explanation of the “drop by half”. But I don’t see any way to interpret these numbers that makes the McClatchy article even close to right.

If memory serves, the ‘surge’ came up to full strength in early June. And there clearly has been a decline in troop deaths, although a relatively modest one. And not close to half. What’s more, if you look at the numbers over the course of the year, the big picture seems to be a relatively stable baseline of just over 80 fatalties a month with a bump up during the months when the surge was coming up to strength.

In other words, this ‘drop by half’ headline seems doubly wrong — both in the big picture of the context of the drop and the small picture of the amount of the drop. In fact, it seems so far off that I’m still trying to think if there’s some specific way they’re interpreting these numbers that hasn’t occurred to me. For instance, are they using a technical definition of combat personnel rather than all military personnel in country? Who can help me here?

Late Update: I’m not sure this is it. But I’m hearing some suggestion that the issue here may be what I speculated — namely, that the issue is the definition of ‘combat deaths’.

Here are the numbers of fatalities, again from icasualties, broken out by ‘hostile’ and ‘non-hostile’.

&nbsp&nbsp Hostile &nbsp Non-Hostile &nbsp Total
Jan &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp 78 &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp 5 &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp 83
Feb &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp 71 &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp 10 &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp 81
Mar &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp 71 &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp 10 &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp 81
Apr &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp 96 &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp 8 &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp 104
May &nbsp&nbsp 120 &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp 6 &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp 126
Jun &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp 93 &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp 8 &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp 101
Jul &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp 67 &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp 12 &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp 79
Aug &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp 55 &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp 27 &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp 82

So, the claim still doesn’t quite add up. But here at least you can see what they’re pointing to. From a high point in May, the number of combat fatalities has dropped to about half what they were. It hard not to notice though that as the number of combat fatalities has dropped the number of non-hostile fatalities seems to be rising dramatically. August had 27, almost one per day. Since the beginning of the war only two months have had more — May 03 and Jan 05. Has the counting methodology changed?

Even Later Update: These month by month numbers aside, the real story appears most clearly in these year by year comparisons provided by Kevin Drum. Short version: the run-up and run-down in casualty numbers seems far more likely to be caused by the repeated seasonal pattern than the ‘surge’.

I’ve written before that there is a very real threat that the Bush administration could go for double or nothing and launch a major military campaign against Iran in the next 18 months. But I had largely discounted this weekend’s rush of rumor and sketchy details about the possibility of an imminent attack. Among other reasons, I have a well-grounded skepticism about stories about US politics I read fully-formed and attributed in the British press before any American publications seems to have caught wind of it. But maybe I’ve dismissed this too quickly. Todd Gitlin and George Packer have more.

Bill Richardson attributes the Iowa caucus to the Constitution — and God. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Morning Roundup.

You may have noticed a that few days ago it was revealed that President Bush, in a surreal turn, denied knowing how exactly the pre-war Iraqi military came to be disbanded. Paul Bremer gave the New York Times some letters and documents to help remind him.

A previously undisclosed exchange of letters shows that President Bush was told in advance by his top Iraq envoy in May 2003 of a plan to “dissolve Saddam’s military and intelligence structures,” a plan that the envoy, L. Paul Bremer, said referred to dismantling the Iraqi Army.

Mr. Bremer provided the letters to The New York Times on Monday after reading that Mr. Bush was quoted in a new book as saying that American policy had been “to keep the army intact” but that it “didn’t happen.”

The dismantling of the Iraqi Army in the aftermath of the American invasion is now widely regarded as a mistake that stoked rebellion among hundreds of thousands of former Iraqi soldiers and made it more difficult to reduce sectarian bloodshed and attacks by insurgents. In releasing the letters, Mr. Bremer said he wanted to refute the suggestion in Mr. Bush’s comment that Mr. Bremer had acted to disband the army without the knowledge and concurrence of the White House.

I don’t remember the precise specifics. But in pretty much all the books on the Iraq fiasco it’s clear that this was a decision that came with Bremer from Washington. And my recollection at least is that this very much came out of the Chalabi/Feith/Wolfowitz ‘clean slate’ approach that dominated the early days of the occupation. So the idea that Bremer somehow came up with this on the fly or that the Americans were forced to confirm some sort of fait accompli flies in the face of all the evidence and, it would seem now, ample documentary evidence in Bremer’s possession.

The Iraq War is spawning its own lexicon, and just as in Vietnam some of the richest new terms are euphemisms which unintentionally highlight the absurdity of the situation. Today we are introduced to the “mini-benchmark.”