Clift: The Man Behind the Curtain

Eleanor Clift of Newsweek offers the following: The Wizard of Oz letter:

This was the week the curtain got pulled back on the Bush presidency. In exchange for allowing Condoleezza Rice to testify under oath, President Bush gets to bring along his vice president when he appears  privately before the commission.

A top Republican strategist dubbed the legal document striking the unusual deal "the Wizard of Oz letter" because it strips away the myth that Bush is in charge.

There's lots more, all of it good.

Winston Smith: Why The Bush People Keep Lying

Philosoraptor's Winston Smith has a pair of items that really impressed me: Why won't they just tell the truth? and Why won't they just tell the truth, part 2. From the latter:

...as we all know, lies become more difficult to confess the longer one maintains them and the more elaborate they become. Lies tend to accrete; new lies are required to defend the flanks of previous lies, small lies become extensive tissues of lies, and consequently small liars become big liars. And it's harder to confess to being a big fat liar than it is to confess to having told a relatively small, run-of-the-mill lie. Though this doesn't explain why they chose to lie in the first place, it does help to explain why, relatively far down the path of mendacity, they have elected to stick with their increasingly implausible fabrications.

There's lots more, and as I said above, I find it really, really impressive. Not because he's calling Bush and his people liars, though after trolling through some righty weblogs lately, it's comforting to me to return to the land where people aren't busy applauding the beautiful fabric and stunning cut of the emperor's new clothes. No, the impressive thing is the way he goes beyond the snark and vindictiveness that lots of people, myself (obviously) included, feel toward Bush and Co., and focuses on his own attitudes and what it would take to restore civility and honesty to the discussion.

Such willingness to turn a critical eye on onesself is rare, but Winston Smith routinely displays it.

Anyway, like I said: impressive.

*Fuck* April Fools

We interrupt today's Web-wide spate of mock/faux/ridiculous "news" items to bring you this important announcement: *Fuck* April Fools.

Even under the best of circumstances, April Fools pranks are pretty darn stupid. But in the context of the Web, where foisting bogus content as if it were real is trivially easy, there's even less of a point to it. Those who post information on the Web should, in my view, be doing whatever they can to lend the medium credibility, rather than doing the opposite, as so many seem compelled to do every year at this time.

As a longtime user of the Web, who has been honing his bullshit detector since the early 1990s in order to successfully navigate its labyrinthine spaces, I find the typical April 1 Web jokes to be not just pointless and unfunny, but actually outright annoying. They're user-hostile, in the same way that frames and most navigational javascript and the <blink> tag are.

Give it a rest.

Something to Ask Dr. Rice About

The Washington Post reports that Condoleeza Rice was set to give a speech on 9/11 on national security, including terrorism, that included no mention of Osama or al Qaeda; the focus seems to have been on missile defense and the like. This should make Rice's testimony before the 9/11 commission next week a bit more interesting. The Bush camp is already counterspinning that it's not what they were going to say, it's what they were doing behind the scenes that nobody, including Richard Clarke, knew about. Ahem.

Thirteen Months In

I've updated my Iraq-Vietnam comparison graphs with the numbers of US dead in Iraq during the month of March; see below. March's numbers were up, sadly, as the people who were concentrating on killing Iraqis during February turned their sights (well, their improvised roadside bombs) back on us.

Again, I'm getting these figures from the advanced search tool at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund site, and from Lunaville's page on Iraq coalition casualties. The figures are for the number of US dead per month, without regard to whether the deaths were combat-related.

The first graph shows the first thirteen months of each war. (Click on any image for a larger version.)

Next, the same chart, with the Vietnam numbers extended out to cover the first four years of the war:

Finally, the chart that gives the US death toll for the entire Vietnam war:

Yes, I'm completely aware that we had fewer troops in-theater in the early stages of the Vietnam war than at comparable points in the Iraq war. If I were trying to make a comparison of the relative lethality of the two conflicts, normalized for troop levels, I'd be starting the Vietnam graph later, in 1965.

But I'm not looking at that. I'm looking at these wars from a political perspective, looking at how politicans deal with bodybags coming home. And since December of '61 is the date of the US death that Lyndon Johnson subsequently identified as having been the first to occur in the cause of Vietnamese freedom, that's when I chose to start the Vietnam graph.

Prankster Engineers Restaurant Strip Searches

In these dangerous times, it's comforting to know that so many people have taken to heart our government's admonitions to cooperate with law enforcement authorities whenever possible. People like Allan Mathis, former manager of a South Dakota fast food restaurant, who, at the request of a police officer who phoned him up one day, held a 19-year-old female employee in a back office against her willl for three hours, forcing her to remove her clothes and have her body cavities searched. Well, except that it wasn't actually a police officer who phoned him; it was some random prankster who apparently has been phoning up restaurants from Arizona to Massachussetts, successfully getting managers to search female employees and patrons: Bizarre hoax leads to strip searches.

Corn: What To Ask Rice

As long as you're getting the one-day pass at Salon, check out this excellent item from David Corn: Condi's conundrum. It covers the questions he'd like to see the 9/11 commission ask her when she gives her much-resisted public testimony.

Dean: I Know Creepy. And These Guys Are Creepy.

Watergate stool pigeon John Dean has a new book out. It's titled Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush, and over at Salon David Talbot has an interview with the author: Creepier than Nixon (subscription, or watch-the-commercial one-day pass, required).

Thanks to Yian for the heads up.

Teen Arrested for Sexually Abusing Herself

From the AP, via USA Today: "A 15-year-old girl has been arrested for taking nude photographs of her self and posting them on the Internet, police said. ... She has been charged with sexual abuse of children, possession of child pornography and dissemination of child pornography."

What's next, arresting a 14 year old boy caught masturbating for child molestation?

Rice's Credibility (Or Lack Thereof)

Nice summary from the Center for American Progress on the various ways in which Rice is dangling out in public, having asserted things that are not quite factual lately: Condoleeza Rice's credibility gap.