Yet another article from ABC — this one on the front page of their website — on the Pelosi-airplane bamboozle. I find it almost dazzling how nauseating and disingenuous this latest article happens to be. The new news, according to ABC’s Jake Tapper, is that the Pentagon has rejected Pelosi’s request for a military aircraft that can fly from Washington to her district in California without stopping to refuel.

We have here a pretty nice illustration of the iron triangle of right-wing sludge slopping. Queued up by the Moonie press, fed by congressional Republicans and orchestrated by Bush administration officials and then spread far and wide by the gelded mainstream press.

Here’s something that jumped out at me though in the ABC News piece. Tapper provides a list he got from the Pentagon on the strict rules Pelosi must abide by with her US government plane.

Among those is this …

Members of Congress cannot fly on the plane unless their travel has been cleared with the House Committee on Standards (the Ethics committee);

Now, first of all, do military regulations really pull in the okay of the House Ethics committee? That sounds a bit more like a House rule. More importantly, though, did the ABC reporters on this story give a close a look to whether this purported rule was ever enforced with Speaker Hastert? Did he routinely ferry fellow members of Congress around on his plane?

TPM Reader BL reminded me of an incident from back in the Foley scandal in which Hastert was trying to clean up the mess created by his congressional lickspittle Rep. Shimkus (R-IL), a close Hastert ‘ally’ from a nearby district who the Speaker installed to run the House page board.

Writing in the Chicago Sun-Times on October 9th, Lynn Sweet wrote …

A week ago Sunday, about 8 p.m., Shimkus arrived at Scott Air Force Base near Belleville to pick up his ride back to Washington. As speaker, Hastert flies on U.S. aircraft. The government plane picked up Shimkus and then headed to Aurora to board Hastert, who spent the weekend at his Plano home.

So in the midst of the exploding Foley scandal, which the Ethics Committee would eventually whitewash, the esteemed Speaker Hastert had his buddy Shimkus get a separate pick up to fly back to DC with him on his military jet so both could head back to Washington to deal with FoleyGate.

The ABC piece merely quotes an Air Force spokesman saying that Hastert would use the plane only for “himself … one to three staff members and two security staff — members of the Capitol police force. His wife would sometimes fly.” No mention of other members of Congress.

Has anybody asked Hastert’s office how often he shuttled other members of Congress on his military plane?

If there’s no ancient proverb stating that the victories of wounded and unpopular presidents don’t last long, then there should be.

Here at Newsweek, Richard Wolffe and Holly Bailey note what they call President Bush’s “notable triumph” in shutting down the debate about Iraq in the senate.

Yet now we see that seven Republican senators, five of whom voted with their party caucus to shut down the debate on Monday, have now written an open letter to the leaders of the body pledging to “We respectfully advise you, our leaders, that we intend to take S. Con. Res 7 and offer it, where possible under the Standing Rules of the Senate, to bills coming before the Senate” and “explore all of our options under the Senate procedures and practices to ensure a full and open debate.”

I’ll wait to see how aggressively they push this. But as a general matter the writing is on the wall. The president can no more plug the dike against the on-rush of reality in the senate than he can talk or bamboozle his way out of the mess he’s made in Iraq.

The Times has a further update on that rash of downed US military helicopters in Iraq. It turns out that in addition to today’s apparent shoot-down of a CH-46 Sea Knight north of Baghdad, there was another as-yet unreported incident on January 31st in which a private security’s firms helicopter working on behalf of the State Department was shot down on a flight from Hilla to Baghdad. Fortunately, no one flying on that helicopter seems to have been killed. And another helicopter swooped down a short time later and evacuated the survivors of the crash.

That brings to six the number of US military or de facto US military (i.e., private security firm helicopters) shot down in Iraq in little more than two weeks.

There seems little doubt now that this is more than a statistical anomaly. But investigators still don’t seem to have a clear grasp of what’s happening. The one piece of information that appears relative clear is that this is not being caused by new weaponry. It’s been accomplished with high-caliber machine gun fire in most or all cases. The insurgents are just getting better, or more aggressive, or more ominously, they’re getting better at knowing where the helicopters are going to be.

Notes the Times: “Historically, improved tactics in shooting down helicopters have proved to be important factors in conflicts in which guerrillas have achieved victories against major powers, including battles in Somalia, Afghanistan and Vietnam.”

Late Update: On the general topic of helicopters, in this case attack helicopters, see this 2003 article by Fred Kaplan in Slate on the history of the attack helicopter, how well or poorly they work, and how the Army/Air Force rivalry played into the equation.

Fourth try’s the charm? From the WSJ: “U.S. officials are working to spare Saddam Hussein’s former vice president from a rapid trip to the Iraqi gallows, fearful that his execution, following the flawed hangings of Mr. Hussein and a co-defendant, could further damage the credibility of the American-backed government.”

Today’s Must Read: Vanity Fair on whether the administration is planning on war with Iran.

CNN headline: “Libby defense to challenge Russert’s credibility.”

Join the club.

Rothenberg: Dems likely to defy history, hold House majority in ’08.

Condi explains what the State Department is doing to fix Iraq.

I’ve given a lot of virtual ink to this Pelosi-jets story. So let me point out this AP story on the issue, which is vastly better than what we’ve seen from all the cable nets and most of the rest of the media. Not perfect but it puts in context the essential issue — that Pelosi wants a jet that can carry enough fuel to reach California.

Breaking: The Edwards campaign has just released statements from him and the two bloggers at the center of the controversy, and it looks like they’re going to survive.

Read the statements here.