You know it’s bad–very, very bad–when Trent Lott gets bashful:

Last Tuesday afternoon, a day before President George W. Bush went on TV to explain his decision to send more troops to Iraq, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called his Republican colleagues together for a private talk.

Several GOP senators had already come out against the plan. McConnell, Bush’s closest Senate supporter on Iraq, hoped to keep others from defecting. He urged his colleagues to stand together at least until Bush had the chance to speak to the country.

After the meeting, the senators went outside the room to display their unity to waiting reporters. McConnell said he thought more troops were just the thing to “give us a chance to succeed.” He then stepped aside so the other senators could second his sentiments. No one came forward. McConnell’s eye fell on Trent Lott. “Trent?” McConnell said, motioning him toward the microphone. “I don’t think I have anything to add,” said Lott.

Thanks to TPM Reader JW for the catch.

Jon Swift brings a smile to the face, if not a tear to the eye. Via Wolcott.

TPM Reader PS chimes in on our man Fred Kagan …

Just a note on Fred Kagan – the guy is not an expert on insurgency, civil war, or stability ops. He has a Ph.D in history, with a focus on the 19th century Russian military. His major scholarly book is on Napoleon from 1801-5. From what I can tell, he has no serious background studying the issues that are at the core of his “surge” plan (his AEI bio page is below). So I am completely baffled by the extent to which the media has given him credibility as a “military expert”; one imagines how the surge would have been received if Kagan was accurately identified as “an expert on Napoleon and the early 19th century Russian army.” His CV reveals no publications in refereed history or political science journals in the last decade.

Basically the intellectual architect of the surge is an oped/Weekly Standard writer whose only substantive expertise is on Napoleon. Great. . . .

And it gets better.

BelgraviaDispatch notes that Kagan seems to have trimmed his necessary number for the surge from 80,000 to 30,000 over the three and a half weeks from early to late December. They’ve got him kowtowing so bad you’d think the White House were a tenure committee.

And if he’s a Napoleon expert, what does he say about the Peninsular War.

Late Update: TPM Reader SR speaks up in Kagan’s defense: “Your downplay of Kagan as a military expert is baseless, he stayed at the Holiday Inn last night.”

From The Independent:

The American company appointed to advise the US government on the economic reconstruction of Iraq has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars into Republican Party coffers and has admitted that its own finances are in chaos because of accounting errors and bad management.

. . .

BearingPoint [formerly KPMG] is being paid $240m for its work in Iraq, winning an initial contract from the US Agency for International Development (USAid) within weeks of the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. It was charged with supporting the then Coalition Provisional Authority to introduce policies “which are designed to create a competitive private sector”. Its role is to examine laws, regulations and institutions that regulate trade, commerce and investment, and to advise ministries and the central bank.

Last week The Independent on Sunday revealed that a BearingPoint employee, based in the US embassy in Baghdad, had been tasked with advising the Iraqi Ministry of Oil on drawing up a new hydrocarbon law. The legislation, which is due to be presented to Iraq’s parliament within days, will give Western oil companies a large slice of profits from the country’s oil fields in exchange for investing in new oil infrastructure.

Sounds like another investigation for Henry Waxman.

Pretty strong stuff for a straight news lead (from McClatchy):

President Bush and his aides, explaining their reasons for sending more American troops to Iraq, are offering an incomplete, oversimplified and possibly untrue version of events there that raises new questions about the accuracy of the administration’s statements about Iraq.

But certainly not unwarranted.

The reports of his death having been greatly satirized, Michael Ledeen is now revealed as a caricature of himself. His preening and self-serving answers in a Salon interview are too numerous to meaningfully excerpt. So go take a look.

Do not miss this bleak but fascinating account in The Guardian of the evolving Sunni insurgency and Iraq’s deepening Civil War. Special thanks to TPM Reader HT for sending it along.

Today’s Must Read: the Bush administration tries to undo the damage done (by them) in Iraq.

I’m not sure how many people saw it. But the big catch in Scott Pelley’s interview with President Bush last night, in my mind at least, was the new rationale for the invasion of Iraq: to defend against future hypothetical scenarios.

Asked whether the invasion has made the Middle East more unstable, the president responds: “Our administration took care of a source of instability in Iraq. Envision a world in which Saddam Hussein was rushing for a nuclear weapon to compete against Iran.”

Well, yes, imagine that.

When I first read this line, I thought the president was saying that Iraq was competing with Iran for a nuclear weapon (in which case, obviously, competing pretty poorly). But reading more closely, I realized that what he was saying that was that if Saddam were still in power now — with the Iranian nuclear issue heating up — that now Saddam could be making things even more complicated by himself getting back into the nuclear game.

Imagine.

Lubrigate update: A federal watchdog says a top Interior Department official may have known about costly errors in federal energy contracts but covered up the mess, allowing billions of dollars to stay in the oil and gas industry’s pockets — and out of the national coffers.