You know things are bad for a lawmaker when you start hearing the “not a target” line.

Which means things are bad for Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK).

Chris Dodd and Bill Richardson pull out of Fox News/CBC debate, leaving only Biden, Kucinich and Gravel. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Happy Hour Roundup.

Outta there!

The DOJ has just told the Arkansas congressional delegation that Tim Griffin — star player in the US Attorney Purge story — is out as US Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas.

His resignation is effective Friday, June 1st.

No word on whether Griffin is taking that job as campaign manager for Fred Thompson’s incipient presidential campaign. (No, we kid you not …)

The president says so many stupid things about Iraq that it’s sort of hard to know which ones to focus on. But in purely political terms if no others I would think the president’s critics would want to focus in on what the White House said about how long the president thinks US troops should stay in Iraq.

By saying that Korea is the model for the US military presence in Iraq, the president is saying that he envisions the US military presence in Iraq continuing for many decades into the future.

Or let’s put that in more stark terms, for most of you reading this post, the president envisions US troops remaining in Iraq long after you’re dead.

Talking about drawdowns in late 2007 or by the end of 2008 is basically a joke, in other words. Countries can really only think on forty or fifty year horizons. So what this means is that the US military presence in Iraq is permanent.

As TPM Reader DS made clear in the email we posted earlier, there’s only one goal that makes sense of that strategy. And that is to permanently dominate the cluster of oil fields in southern Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iran. Nothing to do with democracy, as though that needed saying. But also nothing to do with terrorism. We’re permanently occupying Iraq to lock down the world oil supply.

But all that is commentary. The headline is clear enough to get the message out: the president wants US troops in Iraq for decades to come.

I’ve gotten a number of responses from TPM Readers to my earlier post arguing that the only credible understanding of the guiding aim of the Iraq adventure — at this point, with all we’ve learned — is long-term domination of strategy natural resources. Or to put it more bluntly, to control the oil.

A few readers say this is too sour an assumption. TPM Reader BH, after outlining a democratizing theory, says …

If you view the situation through the lens of neo-conservative foreign policy, it becomes clear that ensuring the successful installation of a functioning democracy in Iraq — which will theoretically spark democratic revolutions across the Middle East, all benefitting the U.S. indirectly — is the Bush administration’s likely justification for maintaining a long-term U.S. military presence in Iraq.

At present, your logic seems to be: There are only two possible purposes of maintain a long-term U.S. military presence in Iraq: nefarious (i.e., securing the world’s oil supply), and virtuous (i.e., ensuring democracy for Iraq). Bush is nefarious. Therefore, the purpose of Bush’s desire to maintain a long-term U.S. military presence in Iraq is to secure the world’s oil supply.

I don’t find any of this persuasive. In fact, I find the whole bit of reasoning needlessly over-determined. I myself wrote a long article just before the war started, explaining how the grand neo-con plan was to institute an outward unfolding cycle of democratizing and chaos in the region that would ultimately topple almost all the governments in the region.

So is it about democracy after all? Of course, it is. But approaching the matter at this level of soft and vague generality is meaningless. If you’re out to control a country, its territory or its resources, of course having the country be stable, respectable and democratic is a great thing. There are always these great tag lines that we want an Iraq that is democratic, is allied to the US in our various endeavors, doesn’t threaten its neighbors, fights with us in the war on terror, etc. If nothing else, even the most cynical and militaristic of Americans — the Dick Cheney type — wants democracies so long as they are pliant and generate the right policies. But this is only the idealism of laziness, a fuzzy coating for real aims that sometimes the deeply cynical even half believe.

But given the particularities of the situation, the permanent occupation of Iraq simply isn’t compatible with the aim of democratizing the country. It’s just something that would be nice. And wouldn’t it? Look at their words and their actions and you see that what the people in the White House mean by ‘democratization’ is to keep our troops in the country long enough that they start ordering their affairs peaceably and through orderly processes and decide through those processes that they want us to stay and continue using the country as a base for US power in the region. It’s a grand have your cake and eat it too.

Is it all to get hold of the oil? I don’t think large groups of people are often able to sustain such crude goals, at least not that baldly stated, even to themselves. But that’s the heart of it. Bundled up in their own shallow and lazy thinking, the main actors’ idea was that we can take this region where a lot of people really don’t seem to like us much and if we just sit on them long enough we can get them to like us, because that’s what happened in Germany and Japan, right?

TPM Reader WG on Bush, Korea and all the flailing spinmeisters at the White House ginning up more ideas of what the hell it is we’re doing …

I find it hard to believe that people are actually taking Bush’s Korean analogy seriously with respect to Iraq. And, so far, the Democratic Congress seems to be giving him a pass on it. The timing was good, of course. He caught Congress with barbeque on their collective chin.

As you noticed, there are some remarkable differences between Korea and Iraq, not the least of which is the fact that there never was a Korean resistance to our occupation of the South or to the Soviet occupation of the North, following the liberation, division and occupation of Korea after World War II. The struggle for unification between the South and the North came down to a rather traditional war and a test of military power between the US on one side and the Soviets and China on the other.

The proper analogy for Iraq is still Vietnam. While the government we created in South Korea was functional and able to control its population, the government we have created in Iraq, like the government we created in South Vietnam, has been largely irrelevant. In Iraq, Shiites and Sunnis are fighting us, our al Maliki government, the Kurds, each other and themselves in a last-man-standing free-for-all. While it’s tempting to try to find some method to the madness of the last few years, you won’t find it in a 50-year plan to control the oil supply of the Middle East. That’s a pipe dream that didn’t survive the occupation. By floating the Korean occupation as an analogy for Iraq, Bush has created one more leaky vessel to cling to as his presidency is swept into the backwaters of history. We may be in Afghanistan 50 years from now, but we won’t be in Iraq.

To a degree I agree the whole ‘control the natural resources of the region’ idea didn’t survive ‘first contact’, to paraphrase the US Army line about military planning. But denial is a useful thing. And a lot of the flailing about of recent years, actually most of it, has been an effort to find some way to sustain the original vision.

One of my first introductions to how aggressively the post-2000 Rove GOP was going to use bogus ‘vote fraud’ stories to stop minorities from being able to vote came in the extremely close South Dakota senate race back in 2002. That was when Sen. Tim Johnson (D-SD) barely squeaked out a victory over Jon Thune (R). Thune, of course, came back two years later and defeated South Dakota’s senior senator and then Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D). If you go back and look through the TPM Search for ‘South Dakota Fraud’ you’ll find a decent cross section of the reporting and writing I did on the subject in the spring and summer of 2002.

It was a riveting and also profoundly disgusting story. The whole rightwing noise machine from Sioux Falls to the Journal OpEd page spreading tales about the rampant vote fraud on the state’s Indian reservations. For folks more familiar with how this stuff works in the South it was reminiscent of something from early in the 20th century or late in the 19th. And the aftermath was a lot like the cases we’ve learned about in the aftermath of the Attorney Purge. Lots of lurid stories and in the end usually it’s left to some reasonably honest Republican officeholder to scrutinize the whole thing and have to announce that all the stories were bogus.

In any case, I mention all this because the LA Times has a good article out this evening explaining one of the key reasons that former Minnesota US Attorney Thomas Heffelfinger ended up on the firing list: took too strong a stand in favor of protecting the voting rights of the state’s sizeable Native American population.

The state’s Republican Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer wanted to use her office to crack down on Native American voting. But apparently Heffelfinger wouldn’t play ball.

Remember the Rove/Gonzales motto: Just because there’s a 15th Amendment doesn’t mean we have to take it lying down.

Another TPM Reader chimes in on our running debate …

Of course oil is the motive, not just oil in iraq but in iran and saudi and kuwait. democracy is the sales pitch; it’s not much of one since there’s no intent to have democracy in saudi or kuwait but it’s the sale pitch. some salesmen believe such pitches. but what follows is a national commitment to dependence on oil and a refusal to reengineer energy to stop global warming. this is perhaps in the long run the single worst aspect of the whole mad crazy cruel plan.

The election of 08 is really about this plan versus some alternative. Hillary unfortunately is pretty much aligned with the bush plan, although she doesnt want to say so. she would not withdraw all the troops and would stay in the region forever.

This really is the big picture. I broach it in today’s episode of TPMtv, which will be coming up later this morning. And I’m hoping we’ll be able to get into it more in next week’s episodes. We’re fast approaching the time when the time required to organize an orderly departure from Iraq is longer than the time left in the Bush presidency. I’m not saying we let the dying continue in January 2009 and not try to do anything about it. I’m just trying to focus on the fact that as we try to end the president’s disastrous policies now with the very blunt implements of congressional power we need to also be thinking of a broader strategy for what comes after Bush. Because getting out of Iraq is only one part of the puzzle, in some ways not even that big a part. We can’t get back to where we were before the invasion. A whole series of dynamics have been let loose that can’t be bottled back up just by getting out. Troop deployment in Iraq, combatting terrorism, the organization of our economy are all part of one puzzle. And the reader’s right. That’s the puzzle that’s on the table in 2008. So who’s talking about it? Who’s addressing the issue at that level?

Troops ask Lieberman during visit to Iraq when they’re going home. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Morning Roundup.

Today’s Must Read: what happens when a U.S. attorney raises the issue of possible discrimination against minority voters with the Justice Department division charged with protecting minority voters? What about when the affected voters are largely Democratic?