Bush DOJ appointee Schlozman kicked voting rights ass in civil rights “reign of terror” at Main Justice before heading to Missouri to crack down on Dems!

Mitt Romney: Catching Bin Laden not worth the money it would cost.

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A seasoned campaign professional tells us what the candidates have to accomplish tonight — and what we should expect from them. His thoughts are here — let us know what you think.

As we’ve suggested many times over recent weeks, the US Attorney Purge story is much bigger than the eight fired US Attorneys you’ve already heard about. Now we have another case where a US Attorney in a key swing state was likely forced out in 2006 to be replaced by a Gonzales Justice Department flunky under the US Patriot Act. It’s looked for some time now like Thomas Heffelfinger, former US Attorney in Minneapolis, was likely pushed aside to make room for the now notorious Rachel Paulose, the then 33 year old whose lavish US Attorney ‘coronation’ ceremony garnered so much attention earlier this year.

Paulose, you’ll also remember, recently made news when her entire senior staff voluntarily stepped down due to her alleged managerial incompetence and dictatorial style — a blow-out even a crisis intervention from Main Justice couldn’t contain.

She’s also garnered notice for being a pal of disgraced and defenestrated DOJ appointee Monica Goodling.

In any case, how’d Paulose get her job? To date, her predecessor Heffelfinger has been alternately coy and noncommittal about why he left, though he has recently denied being forced to resign. That however has not silenced speculation in Minneapolis that he was in fact forced out to make room for the rapidly-rising Paulose. And now we have new information from McClatchy that adds a lot of weight to those suspicions. Just around the time Heffelfinger decided to leave his name had turned up on an early version of the DOJ firing list.

Just to be clear, Heffelfinger stills says it’s just a coincidence. He told McClatchy today, “I had no indication whatsoever at any point during my service as U.S. attorney that anybody at Justice was less than fully satisfied with my work.”

As long as that’s what he’s saying, it’s probably more than enough for DOJ defenders to hang their hats on. But in this case I’m not much for coincidences. Let’s put him down as another case of a US Attorney the Gonzales clique wanted gone, who helpfully resigned in short order and was subsequently replaced by a GOP operator like Paulose.

Renzi could resign as early as Friday.

With Harry Reid’s controversial ‘war is lost’ quote and with various other pols weighing in on whether we can ‘win’ or whether it’s ‘lost’, it’s a good time to consider what the hell we’re actually talking about. Frankly, the whole question is stupid. Or at least it’s a very stilted way of understanding what’s happening, geared to guarantee President Bush’s goal of staying in Iraq forever. A more realistic description is President Bush’s long twilight struggle to see just how far he can go into one brown paper bag.

We had a war. It was relatively brief and it took place in the spring of 2003. The critical event is what happened in the three to six months after the conventional war ended. The supporters of the war had two basic premises about what it would accomplish: a) the US would eliminate Iraq’s threatening weapons of mass destruction, b) the Iraqi people would choose a pro-US government and the Iraqi people and government would ally themselves wtih the US.

Rationale ‘A’ quickly fell apart when we learned there were no weapons of mass destruction to eliminate.

That left us with premise or rationale ‘B’. But though many or most Iraqis were glad we’d overthrown Saddam, evidence rapidly mounted that most Iraqis weren’t interested in the kind of US-aligned government the war’s supporters had in mind. Not crazy about a secular government, certainly not wild about one aligned with Israel and just generally not ready to be America’s new proxy in the region. Most importantly, those early months showed clear signs that anti-Americanism (not surprisingly) rose with the duration of the occupation.

This is the key point: right near the beginning of this nightmare it was clear the sole remaining premise for the war was false: that is, the idea that the Iraqis would freely choose a government that would align itself with the US and its goals in the region. As the occupation continued, anti-American sentiment — both toward the occupation and America’s role in the world — has only grown.

I would submit that virtually everything we’ve done in Iraq since mid-late 2003 has been an effort to obscure this fact. And our policy has been one of continuing the occupation to create the illusion that this reality was not in fact reality. In short, it was a policy of denial.

It’s often been noted that we’ve had a difficult time explaining or figuring out just who we’re fighting in Iraq. Is it the Sunni irreconcilables? Or is it Iran and its Shi’a proxies? Or is it al Qaida? The confusion is not incidental but fundamental. We can’t explain who we’re fighting because this isn’t a war, like most, where the existence of a particular enemy or specific danger dictates your need to fight. We’re occupying Iraq because continuing to do so allows us to pretend that the initial plan wasn’t completely misguided and a mistake. If we continue to run the place a bit longer, the reasoning goes, we’ll root out this or that problem that is preventing our original predictions from coming to pass. And of course the longer the occupation continues we generate more and more embittered foes to frame this rationalization around, thus creating an perpetual feedback loop of calamity and self-justification.

It’s a huge distortion to say that this means the war was ‘lost’. It just means what the war supporters said would happen didn’t happen. The premise was bogus. Like I said at the outset, the whole exercise is like getting trapped in a brown paper bag. You can keep going into the bag and into the bag and into the bag and never get out or change anything. Or you can just turn around and walk out of the bag.

Of course, the damage that’s been done over the last four years of denial is immense — damage to ourselves, to the Iraqis, damage to Middle Eastern security and our standing in the world. So walking out of the bag isn’t easy and it won’t fix things. But the stakes alleged by the White House are largely illusory. Most of the White House’s argument amounts to the threat that if we walk out of the bag that we’ll have to give up the denial that the White House has had a diminishing percentage of the country in for the last four years. The reality though is that the disaster has already happened. Admitting that isn’t a mistake or something to be feared. It’s the first step to repairing the damage. What the president has had the country in for four years is a very bloody and costly holding action. And the president has forced it on the country to avoid admitting the magnitude of his errors.

Today’s Must Read: George Tenet shocks the world with the revelations in his new memoir.

From a reader with his ears open …

So. It’s Friday, and the Pentagon leaks word that a top al-Qaeda operative has been captured. Or, actually, that he was captured last year, but that he’s just been transferred from the custody of the CIA to DoD. Wait, that’s not quite right. He was transferred earlier in the week. But still. It’s important news. Right?

Only here’s the thing. When you have a story like this, you don’t release it on a Friday. There’s nothing time-critical about it. There’s no reason to squander the positive headlines on the slowest media day of the week.

Maybe you’ve already heard something. Or maybe we’ll get the word in the next few hours. But I can’t think of a surer sign that the administration will be releasing some information later today that it would rather we all ignored. Who knows? It could be a post-Gonzales testimony DoJ document dump. It might be word of another probe into Rove. Maybe the RNC will be turning over some e-mails. But you can take it to the bank – something’s coming down the pike.

I don’t normally make a habit of flagging stuff like this. But I really appreciate Bill Moyers’ and Co.’s highlighting our work here at TPM. So I wanted to let you know that I’ll be appearing this evening in the first regular episode of Moyers’ new show Bill Moyers Journal.

Many of you saw and have written in about the show on the press coverage of the lead-up to the Iraq War. But I guess that was technically a ‘special’ rather than one of the regular segments, of which tonight’s is the first.

If you’re interested you can find the time and station in your area.

I haven’t seen the show myself. So I can’t tell you exactly what’s included — here’s the online blurb. But I sat down for an interview with Moyers’ last week for the show. And they had a crew over here at TPM HQ filming some of what we do. So if you’re interested, tune in. Apparently the full show will be online at the Bill Moyers Journal website after it runs on tv.

The Justice Department sends Congress a list of the documents that it doesn’t want them to see.