NO RECOURSE FOR THE LITTLE GUY. Pandering to the insurance industry, gas and oil producers and tobacco companies, the Senate has added the so-called Class Action Fairness Act of 2004 (S. 2062) to its summer legislative agenda. Anything but fair, this legislation would make it far more difficult for consumers to fight corporate abuse. Just how badly does big business want this legislation passed? Enough to hire nearly over 475 lobbyists to advocate for this anti-consumer legislation.

Visit Moving Ideas to learn more about this anti-consumer bill and what you can do to help defeat it!
--Editors of MovingIdeas.Org

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE. "We realized that we were all badly disillusioned with the government and felt we just had to stand up and be heard, even though that was a little against our usual behavior." So says William C. Harrop, ambassador to Israel under George H. W. Bush and the organizer of Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change. See what else Harrop had to say in his interview with the Prospect's Laura Secor.

Also on The Daily Prospect:

• Backstage Pass: How David Bossie and Citizens United snuck their anti-Clinton ad onto 60 Minutes (in seven markets, anyway). By Rob Garver.
• The Last Hurdle: John Kerry's biggest problem -- still -- is the national security gap. Here's how he can close it. By Kenneth S. Baer.

THE MORAL CASE. Looking back on the Iraq War, the editors of The New Republic concluded this week:

But, if our strategic rationale for war has collapsed, our moral one has not. In the '90s, this magazine supported military intervention to prevent slaughter in Bosnia, Kosovo, and (unsuccessfully) Rwanda. And, in the process, we learned that stopping genocide brings unexpected rewards. Because the United States went to war twice in the Balkans, southeastern Europe is now largely at peace, increasingly democratic, and slowly integrating into Europe. By contrast, in Rwanda, where the United States stood by, genocide's aftershocks have helped plunge much of Central Africa into war, killing millions and destabilizing an entire region.

I'm not so sure about this rationale. Ironically, arch-interventionist John McCain's op-ed in today's Washington Post shows us the best reason for skepticism. Writing about the unfolding catastrophe in Sudan, he writes:

The U.N. Security Council should demand that the Sudanese government immediately stop all violence against civilians, disarm and disband its militias, allow full humanitarian access, and let displaced persons return home. Should the government refuse to reverse course, its leadership should face targeted multilateral sanctions and visa bans. Peacekeeping troops should be deployed to Darfur to protect civilians and expedite the delivery of humanitarian aid, and we should encourage African, European and Arab countries to contribute to these forces.

The United States must stand ready to do what it can to stop the massacres. In addition to pushing the U.N. Security Council to act, we should provide financial and logistical support to countries willing to provide peacekeeping forces. The United States should initiate its own targeted sanctions against the Janjaweed and government leaders, and consider other ways we can increase pressure on the government. We must also continue to tell the world about the murderous activities in which these leaders are engaged, and make clear to all that this behavior is totally unacceptable.

This is pretty weak brew, seeing as how the genocide in Sudan is actually unfolding before our eyes, rather than, as in Iraq, being something that took place years ago. A prominent US official is calling for other countries to intervene militarily while we "provide financial and logistical support." Why shouldn't we do more? The answer, of course, is that our ground forces are stuck in Iraq participating in a mission that's under-manned as it is. Indeed, since the Iraq War started, we've seen situations where there's been a compelling case for American humanitarian intervention in Liberia, Congo, and Haiti as well as Sudan, but in all cases there simply wasn't very much we could do consistent with the continuing mission in Iraq. Meanwhile, even if other countries were inclined to send their forces abroad, the fact is that we're also trying to gain more foreign support for the Iraq mission.

The point is simply that there's no shortage of problems in the world that could be ameliorated by the use of American military power. On the contrary, the problem is that there's a shortage of American military power to ameliorate serious humanitarian problems. That means that unless we're going to create a much larger military, we need to be careful about how we expend those forces. That applies not only to "realist" skeptics of humanitarian mentions but also -- in some ways especially -- to those of us who believe in using American power to advance American interests. Like anything else, the use of force entails opportunity costs in addition to direct ones, and jumping at anything with any kind of humanitarian component winds up creating a need to ignore more acute crises later.

--Matthew Yglesias

COUGH UP. Here's an interesting scoop about how the Republican K Street machine works. Not only is the GOP leadership pressuring trade groups to hire Republicans, but they are pressuring Democratic business lobbyists to spy on Democratic legislators. Reports The Hill:

Democratic lobbyists are giving House Republican aides and lawmakers closely held information about the voting intentions of congressional Democrats in exchange for access to private meetings with GOP officials on Capitol Hill.

For House Republican whips, the inside information on Democratic voting strategies can yield a crucial awareness of what the ultimate vote count on the floor might be.

...

House Republican sources provided The Hill with e-mails showing lobbyists providing information about Democratic whip efforts to defeat the foreign sales corporation (FSC) tax measure. The $143 billion in tax breaks for corporations passed 251-178; 48 Democrats broke ranks and voted for the bill, and 23 Republicans opposed it.

The e-mails reveal that some Democratic lobbyists are willing to sell out their former bosses and that House Democratic leaders are having difficulty keeping their members in line.

In an e-mail, a Democratic lobbyist asks permission to attend a meeting about FSC: “I heard there is a … meeting tomorrow at 3pm. Is it OK for me to attend on behalf of my clients?”

The GOP aide replied: “Sure, but what intel are you gonna get us? You worked for [Rep. Robert] Matsui [D-Calif.] right? Where are the California Dems? Is [Minority Leader Nancy] Pelosi [D-Calif.] really holding Dems feet to the fire?”

The lobbyist replied: “Yeah, I worked for Matsui (back when he was [for] free trade). I think Pelosi will be working this hard — you probably already know this, but I just heard that the Dems will be putting in repatriation in their substitute (which will mollify the [California] and West Coast Dems).”

Interesting stuff, and completely unprecedented, as far as I know.

By the way, in case you're wondering -- yes, Roll Call and The Hill regularly scoop The Washington Post and The New York Times on lobbying stories.

--Nick Confessore

RISING WAGES? USA Today's editorialists take a whack at John Kerry's criticism of the president:

Most measures of economic health, while below levels of the booming 1990s, have been heading upward. The economy has added an impressive 1.2 million jobs since January, inflation rose a modest 2% over the past year, and wages are picking up.

This is reminiscent of The Washington Post's June 19 editorial which made the same point:

Now comes the next round of political gloom-mongering. Sen. John F. Kerry, the victor in the Democratic primaries, has been telling voters this week that although job creation may have recovered, wages are the real problem. "In the last year, wages have gone down, and prices have gone up," the candidate told an audience on Tuesday. Actually, hourly wages for non-supervisory workers have risen this year by 2.2 percent as of May, so they kept pace with consumer price inflation.

Damn those lying, pessimistic Democrats. Except that as the Post had to concede yesterday, Kerry's actually right:

On June 19 we wrote that wage increases had kept pace with inflation in the year to May, and criticized Sen. John F. Kerry for suggesting that wages had fallen behind. We were wrong and Mr. Kerry was right: Hourly wages for non-supervisory workers rose 2.2 percent, while the consumer price index rose 3.1 percent.

So back to USA Today: While "wages are picking up" nominally, real wages -- called "real" because they're the ones that matter -- are actually going down, not "heading upward." Now as to whether there's anything in particular Kerry could do in the short term to fix this, I'm not so sure. Things like indexing the minimum wage to inflation and making it easier to organize unions should boost the labor share of economic growth down the road, but that's a different story.

--Matthew Yglesias

WE TAKE IT BACK. After having the Office of Legal Counsel write a memo explaining that torture isn't really torture, and that even if it is, the laws don't apply to the president, but in case they do, here's a whole bunch of ways to break the law and get away with it, too, and then refusing the release the memo to Congress without any legal authority, the White House has decided to release it after all and note that maybe this whole thing wasn't such a good idea in the first place. The Post's coverage fails to note that the author of the "disavowed," "derided," "overbroad," and "irrelevant" legal opinion has since been appointed to a spot as a federal appellate judge by the Bush administration.

The administration's line on this is still filled with impenetrable ambiguities. "Bush has not authorized any interrogations that would employ methods outside the law, [an official said] said." The whole point of the memo, however, was to define as legal certain things that are not, in fact, legal. It didn't say, "go break the law," it said, "if you do this you won't be breaking the law." So when they say they're not employing methods outside the law, we need to know which law they're talking about -- the real ones, or the ones their lawyers have made up.

Stepping back, though, the really important thing is this: The administration wrote this opinion, and then sought -- quite stridently -- to keep it secret. Only when faced with a public outcry are they willing to back away from the doctrine it entailed. If the White House had had its way, the public would never have heard a word of any of this, and the memo would never have been disavowed. And, of course, we don't know what other secret memos may be lurking around somewhere. What's more, as Michael Froomkin points out it's not clear from this that the administration has disavowed the expansive view of presidential power that underlay the original torture memos -- the new position seems to be that Bush could order torture if he wanted to, but he just isn't doing it.

--Matthew Yglesias

MIX UPS. Knight-Ridder's Jonathan Landay reports that one plank of the Iraq-Qaeda connection theory seems to be based on a simple case of mistaken identity:

Some civilian Pentagon officials and other experts have cited Ahmad Hikmat Shakir as potential evidence of an Iraqi role in the Sept. 11 conspiracy, a possibility that grew with the discovery of the lieutenant colonel's name on the Fedayeen Saddam rosters.

But the U.S. officials who spoke to Knight Ridder on Monday said there were a number of reasons that intelligence analysts doubted that the officer was the same Iraqi who met the two Sept. 11 hijackers in Kuala Lumpur.

First, they said, the order in which the names were entered on the rosters was different from the name of the Iraqi who worked in Malaysia, indicating that the names didn't belong to the same person.

"It's very confusing, but it's not the same guy," one U.S. official said.

More importantly, the U.S. officials said, U.S. intelligence analysts have determined that on the dates marked on the rosters, the man who met the hijackers in Malaysia wasn't in Iraq. The officials declined to reveal the dates.

This reminds me of another insufficiently noted element in this saga, namely the tendency of certain folks out there on the right to spin grandiose tales of collaboration on the rather slender thread that Abu Zarqawi once got his leg amputated in Iraq. This was always a bit dubious -- Zarqawi typically operated in the part of Iraq that was outside of Saddam's control, he traveled under aliases as though he didn't want the Baath regime to know what he was doing, and his organization wasn't really a part of al-Qaeda anyway -- but more importantly, some of the videotapes we've seen over the past month have made it pretty clear that Zarqawi has two legs.

The moral in both of these stories is that an awful lot of information pours into the U.S. intelligence community about the murky world of terrorism and rogue states, not all of it accurate. That's why there's an intelligence analysis process where people can look at the totality of available -- and sometimes conflicting -- reports, assess the reliability of various sources, and try to make an informed judgment about what's happening. When little bits of data are ripped out of that and leaked to journalists or otherwise paraded in front of the public, you wind up with a lot of noise. If the parading is being done by people motivated with a specific agenda, you can put together some superficially compelling theories that have no real support within the professional community -- and as we see with the names, you wind up making sloppy mistakes.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE. Why'd you do it, Bill? Of all the campaign seasons in all the countries in the world, you publish into Kerry's? The Prospect staff asks: Will My Life hurt the Kerry campaign? Is it, as Sarah Blustain says, "the last thing we need" -- or is Mike Tomasky right that "John Kerry will have suffered nothing" because of the book?

Elsewhere on The Daily Prospect:

• It Ain't Lyin' If...: Bush’s words may be semantically secure, but his intent has always been to mislead. By Matthew Yglesias.
• Never Mind Bob Bullock: Bush is talking again about bipartisanship. It's gonna take a lot more to fool voters this time. By Mary Lynn F. Jones.
• Get Over Yourselves: Our columnist slaps around Margaret Cho and Tom Hanks and tells them to stop being so incredibly smug. By Noy Thrupkaew.

And don't miss these articles from our upcoming July issue:

• It Was a Very Bad Year: There's little to celebrate about Bill Keller's first anniversary at the helm of The New York Times. And the Judith Miller fiasco is only part of the problem. By Todd Gitlin.
• Ballot Insecurity: In theory, the June 30 handover in Iraq is supposed to clear the path to free and fair elections. In practice, it’s a little more complicated than that. By Laura Secor.
• The Unique Brutality of Texas: Why the Lone Star State leads the nation in executions. By Joseph Rosenbloom.

LOOK AT THOSE NUMBERS AGAIN. Newsweek columnist Robert Samuelson has a tut-tutting and rather meandering column about that Pew poll on media and politics. The thing is, it's almost as if Samuelson is blind to his own evidence:

Still, the latest Pew survey confirms—with lots of numbers—something disturbing that we all sense: people are increasingly picking their media on the basis of partisanship. If you're Republican and conservative, you listen to talk radio and watch the Fox News Channel. If you're liberal and Democratic, you listen to National Public Radio and watch "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer." It's like picking restaurants: Chinese for some, Italian for others. And everyone can punch up partisan blogs—the fast food of the news business. What's disturbing is that, like restaurants, the news media may increasingly cater to their customers' (partisan) tastes. News slowly becomes more selective and slanted.

Rush Limbaugh has 14.5 million weekly listeners. By Pew, 77 percent are conservative, 16 percent moderate and 7 percent liberal. Or take Fox's 1.3 million prime-time viewers: 52 percent are conservative, 30 percent moderate and 13 percent liberal. By contrast, 36 percent of Americans are conservative, 38 percent moderate and 18 percent liberal. The liberals' media favorites are slightly less lopsided. "NewsHour's" audience is 22 percent conservative, 44 percent moderate and 27 percent liberal. NPR's audience is 31 percent conservative, 33 percent moderate and 30 percent liberal. Of course, many news outlets still have broad audiences. Daily newspapers are collectively close to national averages; so is CNN.

Let me get this straight. Conservatives set up media that deliberately plays to conservative listeners, demonstrably slants the news in ways that flatter the ideologies and wishes of the Republican Party, and, predictably, garner an audience that slants heavily to the right. Yet such putative "liberal media" as NPR and CNN have roughly equal numbers of liberal, moderate, and conservative viewers. Doesn't that suggest they do a much better job of reporting the news straight? And doesn't that suggest that the problem here is not symmetrical, as Samuelson -- and many other news reporters and pundits -- like to believe?

Samuelson worries, facetiously, that "the partisan drift may grow because distrust is spreading." Baloney. Here's your problem, dude: Conservative media institutions, such as Fox and the Washington Times, ostentatiously disdain the conventions of objective journalism, while the entire conservative political and media class expend enormous amounts of energy mau-mauing mainstream media outlets that do try to report the news straight. It's part of the broader conservative political strategy of labeling anything not explicitly conservative as "liberal," and then applying pressure on the institution at hand -- a newspaper, a think tank, or what have you -- to "balance" by becoming more conservative. And the strategy also helps convince grassroots conservatives that the Establishment is out to get them, building the audience for ideological media outlets while working the mainstream media to get more favorable coverage from them.

Personally, I'm not against the existence of opinionated, ideological media oulets -- I write for several of them -- and I also like that we have nonideological newspapers and magazines that at least try to play it straight. But if you're the kind of person who worries about the "sorting" of audiences, as Samuelson, than you should direct your ire to where it is due.

--Nick Confessore

OOF! Now that the divorce papers of Jack Ryan -- the GOP's Senate candidate in Illinois -- have been unsealed, we can see what it is he didn't want out there:

Jeri Ryan said her then-husband took her on three "surprise trips" in the spring of 1998 to New Orleans, New York and Paris, during which he took her to sex clubs. She said she refused to go in the first and went into the second at his insistence.

"It was a bizarre club with cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling," she said in the court document, adding that her husband "wanted me to have sex with him there, with another couple watching. I refused."

She said on arriving at the third club, in Paris, "people were having sex everywhere. I cried. I was physically ill. [He] became very upset with me and said it was not a 'turn on' for me to cry."

In his legal response to her allegations, Jack Ryan said while he did arrange "romantic getaways" for the couple, they "did not include the type of activities she describes."

"We did go to one avant garde nightclub in Paris, which was more than either one of us felt comfortable with. We left and vowed never to return," he said.

The conventional wisdom on this is undoubtedly that Barack Obama, the talented and buzzy Democratic contender, is now a lock. But I could see how this may actually hurt Obama, because the release of these documents gives the Illinois GOP a chance to get Ryan to drop out and put somebody else on the ticket. On the other hand, the state party is bereft of real talent -- that's how retiring incumbent Peter Fitzgerald got elected -- and it's hard to imagine who they would get to replace Ryan.

--Nick Confessore

TERROR TROUBLES. The big headline result -- and rightly so -- from the latest Washington Post poll is that John Kerry has emerged with a slight lead on the issue of terrorism, which now joins virtually every other issue as a source of Democratic strength. Take a look:

• Health care (+21)
• Taxes (+13)
• Prescription drugs (+12)
• International affairs (+8)
• The economy (+5)
• The budget deficit (+4)
• Terrorism (+1)
• Iraq (-5)

When the unfolding Iraq debacle becomes Bush's strong suit, he's got a big problem. Especially because his Iraq ratings are so bad. Ruy Teixeira elaborates:

I say "interestingly enough" because other data in the poll show that people are not at all happy with how Bush is currently handling the situation in Iraq. His approval rating on Iraq, while improved over last month in the same poll, is still solidly negative at 44 percent approval/55 percent disapproval. Moreover, the poll has the most negative reading yet on whether "the war with Iraq was worth fighting": 47 percent say yes, compared to 52 percent who say no. And a remarkable 71 percent now say that there has been an "unacceptable number of US military casualties in Iraq"--also the most negative reading yet.

A host of other indicators also show the most negative results so far, including whether the war with Iraq has "contributed to the long-term security of the United States" (down to 51 percent), damaged US relations with other countries with other countries who opposed the war (up to 63 percent), contributed to long-term peace and stability in the Mideast (down to 42 percent) and damaged the United States' image in the rest of the world (up to 76 percent). And a high point has been reached (42 percent) in the number of Americans who say we should withdraw our military forces from Iraq "even if that means that civil order is not restored there".

This is dominance across such a broad range of issues, that the interesting question is why Kerry is only leading 48-44. The answer turns out to be everyone's favorite spoiler, Ralph Nader. Factor him out and Kerry's up by eight. The dark cloud, such as it is, on Kerry's horizon is that Bush still has substantial leads on who can be better trusted in a crisis, and on a generic question about making "the country safer and more secure." In light of Bush's poor terrorism ratings, the public is probably open to pursuasion on those counts, but Kerry hasn't yet made his case.

The big X-factor in the campaign, I continue to think, is not the economy (not bad enough to sink Bush, not good enough to save him, especially in light of his very bad ratings on other domestic issues) but the possibility of a new terrorist attack. Will the public see that as evidence that their misgivings about counterterrorism à la Bush were well-founded, or will they rally around the erstwhile "strong leader" in a moment of crisis?

--Matthew Yglesias

THE MYTH OF THE RESURGENT CHRISTIAN COALITION. Speaking of the religious right, check out this story by Wall Street Journal reporter Avery Johnson. Johnson evidently expected to find evidence that gay marriage had re-energized the Christian Coalition, which had fallen on hard times since the heady days of the 1990s. But Johnson's article provides zero evidence that such a resurgence has occurred. There are a bunch of religious right activists saying they hope they'll get some energy going. You have the coalition itself projecting it will bring in $8 million this year, versus the dismal $5.3 million that came from donors last year, and the information that "Some 30 new directors have been appointed to coalition chapters." But there is no evidence presented to back Johnson's claim that "conservative ire over gay marriage is lending fresh energy."

Why? I suspect because the opposite is true. The Washington Post reported last week that religous leaders across the country have been complaining that there isn't much energy among their congregations and activists. The author, Alan Cooperman, interviews a wide range of people, and even those who want the energy to be there are admitting it isn't (and, in some cases, proferring very wishful explanations for the dearth). Cooperman writes:

He has preached for months that gay marriage could be the downfall of Western civilization, but the Rev. Gary F. Smith is worried that the message is not getting across to his flock at the Church of the Nazarene in Leesburg.

"There's quite a bit of lethargy in the pews," he said. "By and large, it's a lay-down-and-roll-over-and-play-dead attitude."

Across the country, evangelical Christians are voicing frustration and puzzlement that there has not been more of a political outcry since May 17, when Massachusetts became the first state to issue same-sex marriage licenses.

Evangelical leaders had predicted that a chorus of righteous anger would rise up out of churches from coast to coast and overwhelm Congress with letters, e-mails and phone calls in support of a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

But that has not happened.

"Standing on Capitol Hill listening, you don't hear anything," said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, one of the country's most vigorous Christian advocacy groups.

Perkins and other evangelical leaders contend that the outrage is out there. They say it has not been felt in Washington because defenders of traditional marriage are still in shock, or are focused on winning state constitutional amendments against same-sex marriage, or are distracted by the war in Iraq and other issues.

But a few skeptics on the Christian right, as well as many on the Christian left, are beginning to conclude that there is more fervor for a constitutional amendment in America's pulpits than in its pews. And politicians of both parties say the issue has had less grass-roots sizzle than they had expected.

"So far, it's really been a top-down issue," said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), a strong opponent of gay marriage who has used his chairmanship of a Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution to hold three hearings on the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment.

Though he is convinced that gay marriage is going to be a "huge" issue, Cornyn said, "what it's going to take is some more bottom-up concern about whether people are losing control of their lives."

Senate Republican leaders said last week that they plan to bring the amendment to a vote in mid-July, a move that evangelicals hope will energize supporters around the country even though the amendment appears headed for defeat. Despite President Bush's endorsement, it is at least 15 votes short of the 67 needed for passage in the Senate, congressional staffers said.

As I've said before, I really think the GOP is making a big strategic error on this issue, their hand forced by a part of their base they can't afford to alienate. But time will tell.

On a different note, I can't help but notice that the Journal's piece is datelined "Looneyville, W. Va." No comment.

--Nick Confessore

EVERY MAN A KING. Here's a nice one from longtime favorite Nedra Pickler:

After a week of campaigning for the less fortunate, John Kerry went on vacation with the fabulously wealthy.

Kerry is a rich man who promotes the Democratic ideal that government should do more to help the poor. He moves between both worlds, spending the past week traveling to downtrodden places like South-side Columbus, Ohio, and the affluent island playground of Nantucket.

That hypocrite! His opponent, by contrast:

Like Kerry, President Bush is a Yale graduate who has benefited from his wealth and family connections. But Bush spends his down time trying to be more of an everyman, preferring to spend vacations at his Texas ranch clearing brush.

"Most Americans don't sit in Martha's Vineyard, swilling white wine," he said at the ranch two years ago.

Now I actually have been known to enjoy some white wine on Martha's Vineyard, so maybe I'm just out of touch. Nevertheless, as far as I can tell "everyman" doesn't own a 1,500 acre ranch worth $1.5 million dollars. One hardly needs to add that the ranch in question was purchased in 1999 as a campaign prop, the small matter of his family's gigantic vacation complex in Kennebunkport, or the fact that our everyman president earns over $400,000 a year in interest alone.

--Matthew Yglesias

WHAT ABOUT THE KURDS? So far in Iraq, America's policy dilemmas have focused around problems within the Shi'ite and Sunni Arab communities. Kurdistan, whose population is broadly pro-American and enthusiastically supportive of the war effort, has been extremely quiet. Recently, however, trouble seems to be brewing. The new interim government dropped hints that it might not abide by the extremely pro-Kurdish interim constitution, prompting the two main Kurdish political parties to drop out of the militia demobilization process and threaten to secede from the Iraqi state unless things go their way.

Yesterday's New York Times contained an enlightening report from Dexter Filkins on Kurdish efforts to re-secure control over formerly Kurdish areas that were subject to ethnic cleansing during the Ba'ath area, indicating that if Kurdish-Arab relations at the political level deteriorate further, those Kurdish militias might get involved in something more than domestic security.

In a seemingly unrelated development, Ilan Berman writes in NRO about deteriorating Israeli-Turkish relations, a fact he attributes to the rise of a semi-Islamist party in Turkey. Seymore Hersh, however, has a rather different theory -- the Turkish government is upset about massive Israeli aid to Kurdish commando groups, a step Hersh reports Israel feels the need to take in light of the ascendance of pro-Iranian Shi'ite parties in southern Iraq. Certainly Israel and Kurdish groups have longstanding ties of various sorts, and I know that Kurdish officials here in Washington have been playing up analogies between the plight of the Kurds and the plight of the Jews before pro-Israeli audiences, seeking to build bridges of some sort.

Needless to say, international man of mystery Ahmed Chalabi has a role to play in this as well. Juan Cole reports that he's Iyad Allawi's chosen go-between in mediation between the Interim Government and the Kurdish leadership. Once upon a time Chalabi was well regarded in Israeli circles, but his recent efforts to cozy up to Shi'a Islamists and the government of Iran have changed all that. What does this all mean? I couldn't say, beyond noting that there are lots of serious underlying problems that go beyond the insurgency and the impending semi-handover of power.

--Matthew Yglesias

A SIMPLER TIME. John Rowland's impending resignation as governor of Connecticut has me feeling nostalgic:

When he first took office, Rowland made $78,000 a year, was paying alimony and supporting a large family when his much wealthier friends and state contractors began to give him a taste of the finer things in life.

They fixed up his cottage in bucolic Litchfield, where Connecticut's movers and shakers summer, complete with a hot tub given to him by a state employee. The governor got thousands of dollars in Cuban cigars and French champagne, a vintage Ford Mustang convertible and free or discounted vacations at the estates of friends -- contractors who won substantial business from the state.

But the high life started to crumble in March 2003 when Rowland's former deputy chief of staff, Lawrence Alibozek, pleaded guilty to federal charges he steered state business to certain contractors in exchange for gold and cash.

Now, obviously, I don't condone this sort of behavior. Nevertheless, there's something to be said for a man who harkens back to the good old days when public officials set themselves up as above the law for the purposes of personal enrichment rather than, say, in order to have people tortured.

--Matthew Yglesias

HEEEEEE'S BACK. There's something inherently enjoyable about watching Bill Clinton emerge on the scene again. I think it will be good for Clinton and probably good for the Democrats. As I see it, the book tour, the attendant publicity, and all the follow-up coverage will have three effects. It will remind the thirty percent of the country that loves Clinton unconditionally of why they loved him. It will drive the anti-Clinton partisans in Washington, and the thirty percent or so of the country that shares their views, into an over-the-top tizzy. (Where the right is concerned, putting Clinton back into public view is like feeding crack to mice. They just can't help themselves. It's almost a Pavlovian response.) And it will remind the remaining part of the country -- the middle-of-the-roaders who didn't care for Clinton's extracurricular behavior but appreciated his work in office -- of how, well, nuts the anti-Clintonites can get, and why they eventually sided with Clinton against his haters. (I'm not using that word in a clinical sense, obviously.)

Conservatives are always at their worst when Clinton comes into play. So, for that matter, are a lot of journalists, who are abetting the conservative project of reducing Clinton's two-term presidency to a string of failures capped by impeachment and the pardon scandal, while downplaying his successes or writing them off as happenstance or coincidence. Matt Yglesias had some thoughts on Sunday's Meet the Press roundtable, which I agree was a little absurd. Even last night's 60 Minutes broadcast, which I thought was in general quite fair, focused very heavily on the impeachment saga -- which is to say, it focused predominantly on his failures as a president, with little discussion of his successes. An alien viewing the program might well have wondered why it was that voters had elected Clinton to a second term. Certainly the guy was no less popular than Ronald Reagan. As this ABC News article points out, Clinton and Reagan had the same average approval ratings for their two terms. The remembrance of Reagan made every effort to account for what popularity he enjoyed. So far, the rehash of Clinton's presidency makes little such effort. There's a clear bias against the guy.

We'll see how the rest of the media bigwigs cover Clinton. I was surprised to see that Maureen Dowd, a charter member of the Catholic Moralizer Squad back during Clinton's day, strikes a vaguely remorseful note in her column, noting that while both Clinton and President Bush have had their 'Who's gonna stop me?' moments, Clinton's "produced a much lower body count."

More reactions as I come across them.

--Nick Confessore

AN EVANGELICAL DEMOBILIZATION. Via Daniel Drezner, the Los Angeles Times reports on a potentially crucial new white paper from the National Association of Evangelicals:

It affirms a religiously based commitment to government protections for the poor, the sick and disabled, including fair wages, healthcare, nutrition and education. It declares that Christians have a "sacred responsibility" to protect the environment.

But it also hews closely to a traditional evangelical emphasis on the importance of families, opposition to homosexual marriage and "social evils" such as alcohol, drugs, abortion and the use of human embryos for stem-cell research. It reaffirms a commitment to religious freedom at home and abroad.

Perhaps most important, the paper goes on to explicitly disavow the theory that all good Christians have a duty to vote Republican:

In the midst of a presidential election year, war and terrorism, the framework says Christians in their devotion to country "must be careful to avoid the excesses of nationalism." In domestic politics, evangelicals "must guard against over-identifying Christian social goals with a single political party, lest nonbelievers think that Christian faith is essentially political in nature."

Now does this mean that Democrats are about to win over the evangelical vote? Not very likely. But just as Democrats depend on not only winning, but utterly dominating, the black vote, the Republican party relies on securing overwhelming support at the polls from white evangelicals. Even a fairly small minority going Democratic could easily tip the balance. The Prospect's Ayelish McGarvey was onto this possibility quite some time ago, and offers thoughts on how Democrats can capitalize on evangelical disillusionment with Bush.

--Matthew Yglesias

WEEKEND UPDATE. Too busy trying to wriggle out of those Lakers season tickets to follow the news? Here's what you missed:

The Columnists

• David Brooks. Why does John Kerry hate freedom?
• Nicholas Kristof. Why doesn't America care about Sudan?
• Fred Hiatt. Iraq sure does produce a lot of wacky anecdotes.
• Jim Hoagland. Is anyone really going to believe this is all the UN's fault?
• David Broder. Chinese dissident, Republican pollster, no difference.
• Thomas Friedman. They love us in China, except they kind of don't.
• Maureen Dowd. Clinton-bashing returns at last.

The Op-Ed You Actually Need To Read

• Robert Kagan and Ivo Daalder on Europe's turn to step up.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE MYTH OF THE ANTI-ABORTION CATHOLIC VOTE. The Los Angeles Times has a must-read op-ed by Andrew Greeley, a sociologist and priest who works for the National Opinion Research Center:

According to the National Opinion Research Center, or NORC, Catholics and Protestants differ little on a battery of abortion questions; large majorities think that abortion should be available when there is a risk of a defective child, a threat to the mother's health or a pregnancy caused by rape, while similar majorities reject abortion if the woman is unmarried or cannot afford another child or simply doesn't want a child. Only 4% of American Catholics consider themselves pro-life on all seven NORC questions, and a third of those voted for Gore anyway, despite his pro-choice stand. One might argue that Catholics should oppose abortion in all circumstances, but in fact they do not.

A useful item to measure the effect of such attitudes is abortion after rape. Among Protestants questioned, 20% reject the availability of abortion in such circumstances, as do 24% of Catholics. The latter group was 10 percentage points less likely to vote for Gore than other Catholics. The net loss of Catholic votes to the vice president therefore was 10% of 24%, or 2.4%. Because Catholics are approximately a quarter of the American population, one quarter of 2.4% is six-tenths of 1%. That is the small amount by which Gore's popular vote victory would have increased if abortion had not been an issue for some Catholics. Moreover, these calculations assume that abortion was the reason why anti-abortion Catholics did not vote for Gore. So the effect of Catholic abortion attitudes might have been even smaller.

To rephrase the mayor's comment, most Catholics do not vote on the basis of the abortion issue, and those who do have little effect.

Why, then, does the White House keep pushing the issue of John Kerry and the bishops? Good question. I suspect it has a lot to do with keeping Kerry off-balance and in an awkward position on a touchy subject. But clearly the Bush administration believes that having bishops and priests denounce Kerry from the pulpit would help them with some segment of voters. I wonder if they are correct.

--Nick Confessore

DOCTOR FEELBAD. The New York Times' Bob Herbert does due diligence on Compton Girdharry, an Ohio doctor and putative victim of out-of-control malpractice lawsuits who President Bush saluted in a recent campaign stop in that state.

[T]he president called for reforms to make it more difficult for patients to seek compensation and to restrict the amount of damages that could be paid to those who prove they have been harmed.

To bolster his argument Mr. Bush introduced a local doctor, Compton Girdharry, to an audience at Youngstown State University. Dr. Girdharry, an obstetrician/gynecologist, said he had been driven from a practice of 21 years by the high cost of malpractice insurance.

The president praised Dr. Girdharry and thanked him for his "compassion."

If Mr. Bush was looking for an example of a doctor who was victimized by frivolous lawsuits, Dr. Girdharry was not a great choice. Since the early 1990's, he has settled lawsuits and agreed to the payment of damages in a number of malpractice cases in which patients suffered horrible injuries.

"It's been four years since my son passed away, and I don't feel any stronger or any happier than the day I lost him," said Lisa Vitale, whose suit against Dr. Girdharry and a hospital was settled out of court.

During an interview in her home in Alliance, Ms. Vitale said she went into Alliance Community Hospital on the morning of Aug. 17, 1993, for the delivery of her second child.

Her first delivery had been by Caesarean section, but Ms. Vitale said she was told that a vaginal delivery this time would not be a problem. While she was in the delivery room, however, the fetal monitoring strip was not properly checked and, she said, she was left alone and in pain for long periods. Dr. Girdharry stopped by around 6 p.m. and then went to dinner.

No one noticed that the baby was in serious distress.

Dr. Girdharry blamed the ensuing tragedy on the nurse. Ms. Vitale, he told me, "was being monitored by a nurse who was what they call a casual part-time nurse, who was not very well trained in reading fetal monitor strips."

By the time he was called back from dinner, he said, it was "too late" to take the steps, including a Caesarean delivery, that might have prevented permanent injury.

The baby was born with severe brain damage. He was unable to even drink from a bottle. He lived six years and four months, requiring nursing care the entire time.

This is not much of a surprise. As my former colleague Stephanie Mencimer in this groundbreaking article in the Washington Monthly, many of the doctors at the forefront of efforts to restrict patients' ability to sue doctors are people with very spotty records indeed. Rarely are they victims of lawsuits that could plausible be described as frivolous.

As Mencimer explains, Bush's stump speeches on medical lawsuits not only grossly distort the truth -- doctors' premiums are not going up because of greedy plaintiffs' lawyers filing baloney suits, but because of poor business practices in the malpractice insurance industry -- but are part of a concerted political strategy:

GOP leaders view malpractice lawsuits as a pivotal issue for the 2004 campaign. With health-care costs skyrocketing on its watch, the GOP is eager to shift blame onto the Democrats, who have long enjoyed greater public trust on the issue. And doctors, who enjoy great credibility among voters, are the key. By linking rising health-care costs to frivolous medical lawsuits, Republicans can use doctors as a cudgel against trial lawyers, the Democratic Party's second-largest funding base and one which could be paralyzed by lawsuit caps. Once bills to restrict malpractice lawsuits are on the table--in Congress and in the state legislatures--Republicans can slip in much broader legal relief for corporations under the guise of bringing down health-care costs, especially for senior citizens.

Don't be fooled.

--Nick Confessore

UP IS DOWN. Amazing stuff out of Dick Cheney's mouth yesterday. CNN reports:

Vice President Dick Cheney said Thursday the evidence is "overwhelming" that al Qaeda had a relationship with Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, and he said media reports suggesting that the 9/11 commission has reached a contradictory conclusion were "irresponsible."

Among conservatives, charges of media bias have truly become the last refuge of the scoundrel.

Spencer Ackerman, guest-blogging at Talking Points Memo, has another example here, courtesy of Donald Rumsfeld.

The problem for the administration's Iraq policies is not that the media is biased against them. The problem is -- to borrow from "The Daily Show" correspondent Rob Corrdry -- that the facts are biased against them.

--Nick Confessore

TIMES UP. The Washington Post's David Ignatius reports on some doings at the Washington Times, everybody's favorite propaganda sheet. Apparently the paper's owners, the Unification Church, are not so happy with bankrolling a paper that is not only a mammoth money-loser but also pretty far over into right field, thanks to editor Wes Pruden. Ignatius also has a good bit about Pruden refusing to publish some Iraq coverage from its sister organization, United Press International, because it reflected badly on the Bush administration:

Coverage of the Korean Peninsula has been an especially delicate issue. The paper's stance has been aggressively anti-Pyongyang. But the church has embraced a conciliatory line, including investment in North Korea. Moon has bankrolled Pyonghwa Motors, which plans to produce cars in the North, along with a hotel, a park and a church there. A senior church official, Ahn Ho Yeol, told a South Korean newspaper last year: "It is our principle to achieve peace on the Korean Peninsula by promoting mutual prosperity." Again, that's a dovish sentiment you won't often read in the Times.

The Unification Church has bankrolled huge losses at the Times, which several sources estimated have totaled more than $1 billion over the past 22 years. The paper's losses are running about $20 million annually, one source said; another source offered a slightly higher estimate. Insiders said that Japanese backers of the church had been especially unhappy with the Times's huge losses and with its right-wing positions on global political issues.

Adding to tensions within the Moon publishing family was the Times's decision last fall not to run an investigative article by UPI on the U.S. military's poor medical treatment of troops returning from Iraq. That UPI coverage went on to win second place in this year's Raymond Clapper awards, along with other journalism prizes. Pruden said yesterday that he thought the story wasn't adequately sourced. He also complained that some UPI commentary articles had become "liberal to the point of leftist" and conflicted with Times editorial positions.

Pruden won't give up control of the Times without a fight. And he has powerful Republican friends on Capitol Hill and in the administration who would probably back a campaign to maintain the paper's editorial line and fend off meddling by its owners. What's clear from the Times-Moon dust-up is that the battle for the soul of conservatism has a new front.

Can we stop pretending the Times is a real newspaper now?

One also has to wonder what, exactly, Pruden's friends on the Hill would be able to do. The Moonies own the Times. Pruden is their employee. They decide what's in the paper and who's in charge, not Tom DeLay. So this is kind of creepy. Stay tuned.

--Nick Confessore

HERE COMES THE SLIME. According to Joe Conason, private eyes have been putting in phone calls to John Kerry's swift boat colleagues, digging for dirt in a manner highly reminiscent of the Richard Mellon Scaife-funded Arkansas Project. Lovely stuff. And entirely predictable.

--Nick Confessore

NO OVERSIGHT HERE. Readers will recall that when the "torture memo" story first broke John Aschcroft not only refused to release the relevant documents to the congress, he also refused to cite any legal basis for his refusal. Yesterday the Judiciary Committee Democrats made another effort to secure the information, but were yet again stymied. This was reported on NPR this morning, but it doesn't seem to have made the papers. Fortunately, one of Tapped's far-flung correspondents was on the scene:

Basically the situation is this. Ashcroft testified some days ago that he would not disclose any documents and refused to answer any questions; but he would not invoke executive privilege; and he said that if Congress wanted any info they can subpoena it. So the Democrats wanted to subpoena the necessary documents. The Republicans on the judiciary committee however felt that a subpoena was unnecessary and provocative and insisted that they were negotiating with Ashcroft to release the documents. So no subpoena on a 10-9 vote.

Quite the elegant bait-and-switch. Ashcroft says he's happy to release it but only if there's a subpoena, Congress says there's no need to subpoena since Ashcroft is such a cooperative kind of guy. Needless to say, Republican thinking on the propriety of subpoenas -- like Republican thinking on so much else -- seems to have changed somewhat since the Clinton years. We have here also a bona fide "rule of law" question as the executive branch asserts that it is both empowered to set aside the laws and to keep its reasons for doing so secret from the Congress.

This is all part of a broader move over the past several years to the total collapse of the concept of congressional oversight. Oversight, for better and for worse, was alive and well during the Clinton administration, mostly for reasons of partisanship. But historically, even when one party controls the Congress and the White House, congressional leaders have been rather jealous of their independence, their perogatives, and the constitutionally appointed role of the institutions they lead. During the Bush years, however, the Senate GOP has allowed the White House to place its handpicked candidate in the Majority Leader's office, while collaborating with their colleagues in the House to quash any and all efforts to investigate anything.

--Matthew Yglesias

CONSERVATIVES DON'T DESERVE ARMCHAIR PSYCHIATRY, EITHER. I've been late commenting on this, but since I've given a lot of grief to people like Charles Krauthammer and Sean Hannity for calling Democrats and liberals mentally unbalanced, it's only fair to give the same to Justin Frank, a psychoanalyst who has just published Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President. Frank has never met nor treated the president, but sees fit to diagnose him as mentally unfit to be president. As Rivka of Respectful of Otters points out here, it is a violation of the professional code of psychiatrists to offer a professional opinion "unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement."

For obvious reasons, this is considered proper medical practice. But I think it's also good political and punditarial practice. It's one thing to speculate on the motives or thought processes of people in politics, although it is very easy to go too far in doing so. But it is the cheapest of cheap shots to assert that someone is clinically nuts because they don't agree with you or because they are liberal or conservative. It's even worse if, like Krauthammer and Frank, the person asserting it is a trained psychologist.

Krauthammer is no longer a practicing psychiatrist, but Frank is. I think he deserves a reprimand from his colleagues.

--Nick Confessore

THAT WAS THEN. Via Kos, here's an excellent article in USA Today listing all the ways in which House Republicans have gone back on the promises they made back in the early 1990s not to abuse power if they ever took back Congress. I won't bother quoting sections, because the whole thing is pretty good -- about as encyclopedic as a newspaper article can be, which is especially impressive given the smallness of USA Today's "news hole" relative to other big dailies.

--Nick Confessore

WHERE DOES BUSH STAND ON ABORTION? Reader J.B. notes that George W. Bush does not share the Catholic Church's position on abortion -- which is a total ban that encompasses birth control. Needless to say, this is not a position shared by many Americans, let alone many Catholics. But that is the official position.

Bush's position is, well, rather hard to pin down. And deliberately so. Check out this selection of his positions on abortion and related issues, and you'll see a politician trying hard to signal to his base that he's against abortion without provoking a negative reaction from more socially liberal swing voters by coming out clearly and strongly on the issue. (Ronald Reagan was the same way.) I spent a few minutes clicking through Bush's campaign Web site, and couldn't actually find any official position on abortion anywhere in it. The main policy areas are given as economy, compassion, health care, education, homeland security, national security, and environment. Look through the "compassion" page, and you'll find stuff on "educating our children" -- hey, doesn't that belong on the "education" page, guys? -- and "fighting poverty at home," but nothing on abortion. (John Kerry lists positions on dozens of issues, including abortion. It's a telling difference in many respects.) So, as far as we know, Bush does not share the Catholic Church's position on abortion. And when it comes to doctrinal issues and litmus tests, it seems to me you don't get to go halfway: Either Bush's position on abortion is one that devout Catholics can support, or it isn't. Bush, of course, is not himself a Catholic. But why is it that conservative Catholic bishops don't ask for Bush to publicly clarify his position, so that all devout Catholics who wish to vote their religious beliefs will know whether or not they can vote for him in good conscience?

Now, Bush is not himself a Catholic. He is a United Methodist. And that faith has a relatively liberal position on abortion:

Our belief in the sanctity of unborn human life makes us reluctant to approve abortion. But we are equally bound to respect the sacredness of the life and well-being of the mother, for whom devastating damage may result from an unacceptable pregnancy. In continuity with past Christian teaching, we recognize tragic conflicts of life with life that may justify abortion, and in such cases we support the legal option of abortion under proper medical procedures. We cannot affirm abortion as an acceptable means of birth control, and we unconditionally reject it as a means of gender selection.

We oppose the use of late-term abortion known as dilation and extraction (partial-birth abortion) and call for the end of this practice except when the physical life of the mother is in danger and no other medical procedure is available, or in the case of severe fetal anomalies incompatible with life. We call all Christians to a searching and prayerful inquiry into the sorts of conditions that may warrant abortion. We commit our Church to continue to provide nurturing ministries to those who terminate a pregnancy, to those in the midst of a crisis pregnancy, and to those who give birth.

Governmental laws and regulations do not provide all the guidance required by the informed Christian conscience. Therefore, a decision concerning abortion should be made only after thoughtful and prayerful consideration by the parties involved, with medical, pastoral, and other appropriate counsel.

So Bush's faith permits abortion under certain circumstances. Does Bush? Once again, we just don't know, and the president appears reluctant to settle the question. It seems to me that if the press is going to write stories questioning whether Kerry is in line with his faith on the issue of abortion, they ought to write stories asking whether Bush is in line with his faith on the issue of abortion. And if he is not -- if, as I suspect, he endorses a more restrictive policy -- then I think it's only fair that the press keep a running watch on his attendance at Methodist services.

--Nick Confessore

ALL FOR NOTHING. Mark Kleiman has an important dissent from the notion that Muqtada al-Sadr's decision to disband his militia is good news:

The subtext seems to be that we're going to let the murder charge slide and allow Sadr to set up a political party. Since our own polling shows him to have picked up enormous popular support by running a guerrilla war against us, and has him currently the second-most-popular figure in (non-Kurdish) Iraq, running only slightly behind Ali al-Sistani, this looks like a pretty terrific outcome from al-Sadr's viewpoint. And he remains our bitter enemy.

Now maybe we're about to double-cross al-Sadr and toss him in the clink as soon as his troops disband. And maybe we could get away with it. But right now this looks to me like a second Fallujah.

Now what you can say in Bush's favor is that -- as with the Falluja surrender -- this was probably the best decision available to him at the time. What must be said against him, however, is that creating the situation where this was our best option available was entirely Bush's fault. Sadr had been kicking around for quite a while as a fairly marginal figure -- a disruptive influence, to be sure, but at best a thorn in the CPA's side. Then they decided to crack down on him -- shut down his newspaper and try to have him arrested.

During the ensuing fighting, Sadr went from being a marginal figure to being the second most popular figure in Iraq. The most popular figure doesn't intend to seek political office; Sadr does. In other words, Sadr's position has become enormously strong over the past several months wholly as a consequence of decisions made by the occupation authorities.

In other news, Michael Barone thinks voting for Kerry is like voting for McClellan and surrender...

--Matthew Yglesias

LIKE MINDS. Looks like Matt isn't the only one opposed to the possibility of Dick Gephardt as John Kerry's running mate. According to The Hill, 22 House Dems have signed a letter to Kerry advocating the selection of John Edwards. That in itself isn't so remarkable, but it's pretty clear that The Hill couldn't find anyone in the House willing to make the case for Gephardt. The closest they could come is South Carolinian John Spratt, who offered only that Gephardt would probably nail down Missouri, but implied that he'd have little impact elsewhere.

Good to see that everyone recognizes a bad combination when they see one. Jimmy Hoffa excluded.

--Jeffrey Dubner

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE. Meet the new gay-rights movement. Led by former Republican Hill staffers, the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce is replacing in-your-face activism with in-your-representative's-office lobbying. Sarah Wildman reports on their goals, their accomplishments, and their promise.

Also on The Daily Prospect:

• Estelle at 90: Where do you learn how to respond to abuses of power? Go ask your mother. By Harold Meyerson.
• Honey, I Sold the Kids: If you were born after 1984, you're a prime target for marketers. Here's an inside look at how advertisers go after Generation Y. An interview with Susan Linn. By Alyssa Rayman-Read.

GRATUITOUS CAMPAIGN LYING. The Washington Post's coverage of John Kerry's recent fundraising success features the Bush-Cheney campaign dissembling for no apparently reason:

Bush-Cheney '04 spokesman Scott Stanzel did not address the question of whether the Kerry fundraising signals sustained Democratic fundraising success. But he said that "we have always indicated we will be outspent by the Democratic nominee and the liberal soft-money groups."

In fact, when money raised by the parties, the two presidential candidates and by "soft money" committees known as "527s" is added, the total on the Republican side is $574 million and on the Democratic side $421 million, a $153 million GOP advantage.

Now I'm not sure that there's any grand point to be made about this -- the Republican financial advantage is of long standing and is probably a permanent feature of the political landscape -- but why would the Bush campaign feel the need to engage in this sort of easily debunked deception? Indeed, this probably understates the Republican edge, since it neglects the 501(c) option where the GOP has stashed some unknown sum of money. Just another day, I guess.

--Matthew Yglesias

NEARLY AS IRRESPONSIBLE? This morning's Washington Post editorial is one of those that seems designed to make me mad.

Yet showing a peculiar instinct for the capillaries rather than the jugular, part of the public debate immediately focused on a single passing point that is no kind of revelation at all: "We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States." Administration foes seized on this sentence to claim that Vice President Cheney has been lying, as recently as this week, about a purported relationship between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. The accusation is nearly as irresponsible as the Bush administration's rhetoric has been.

Now I'd be happy to agree that, technically speaking, nothing the Vice President said this week was a lie. Rather, it was part of the administration's longstanding practice of making technically accurate, but misleading and tendentious, statements in order to try and trick people into believing things that aren't true, while protecting themselves from criticism in the elite media. But there's really no need for me to go into this, because the Post understands perfectly well what went on. After noting that "[t]he administration has not recently suggested that Iraq was behind Sept. 11" (emphasis added) we read:

The trouble for the administration is that Mr. Cheney has not always been careful to distinguish between Iraqi ties to al Qaeda and supposed support for the attacks. Indeed, it was he who kept the Prague meeting story alive long after others in the government thought it discredited. His recent comments not only overstate what now appear to be rather tentative ties between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, but they probably help to keep alive in the minds of many Americans a link between Iraq and the attacks that not even Mr. Cheney still alleges. If the U.S. intelligence community now believes that the relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein consisted of no more than what the commission reports, Mr. Cheney ought not be implying more.

So according to the Post here's the state of play. On the one hand, the administration, in the past, suggested that Iraq was behind 9-11. Currently, they aren't doing that, but they are "overstat[ing]" the extent of Saddam/Qaeda links and keeping stories alive "long after others in the government thought [them] discredited." The result of all this is "to keep alive in the minds of many Americans a link between Iraq and the attacks" which, as the Post acknowledges, was put there by the administration in the first place.

The administration, in other words, is trying to mislead people into ignoring the difference between being responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans and not being responsible for those deaths. The administration's accusers, by contrast, are trying to mislead people into ignoring the distinction between misleading the public about this (after lying to them), and lying to the public. On what planet is the latter "almost" as irresponsible as the former? One is a question of life and death -- war and peace -- and the other is semantic hair-splitting.

--Matthew Yglesias

A PENTAGON-SHAPED APPLE. When the Abu Ghraib story broke, the line from the right was that this was just a few bad actors and it had nothing to do with U.S. policy. The few administration defenders who've cared to weigh in on revelations that the administration's lawyers were busy writing memos all about how torture wasn't really torture and the president can just ignore the law if he feels like it have said these were hypothetical explorations of options. This is all -- and has always been -- quite implausible, but what is one to make of this?

Pentagon officials tell NBC News that late last year, at the same time U.S. military police were allegedly abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ordered that one Iraqi prisoner be held "off the books" -- hidden entirely from the International Red Cross and anyone else -- in possible violation of international law.

It appears, then, that one of our few bad apples is the Secretary of Defense.

Shortly after the suspect's capture, the CIA flew him to an undisclosed location outside Iraq for interrogation.  But four months later the Justice Department suggested that holding him outside Iraq might be illegal, and the prisoner was returned to Iraq at the end of October.

That's when Rumsfeld passed the order on to Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, to keep the prisoner locked up, but off the books.

In the military's own investigation into prisoner abuse, Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba said efforts to hide prisoners from the Red Cross were "deceptive" and a "violation of international law."

Now at one level this is a story -- yet again -- about the mistreatment of prisoners and detainees. But as with the torture memo story, the more important aspect here has to do with the rule of law. It's one thing for the administration to decide that we've got some bad laws and try to get them changed. These changes might be for the worse, but legal changes that many people will think are for the worse are par for the course in a competitive democracy. Simply ordering your subordinates to break the law, however, is not par for the course at all, nor is it an acceptable response to any sort of situation.

The executive branch has a duty to obey the law -- and to see that the law is obeyed -- whether or not its officers like what the law says. This is pretty basic stuff, and no one, regardless of ideology, should find this conduct acceptable.

--Matthew Yglesias