Wait. What?

President George W. Bush would like to see a lengthy U.S. troop presence in Iraq like the one in South Korea to provide stability but not in a frontline combat role, the White House said on Wednesday.

The United States has had thousands of U.S. troops in South Korea to guard against a North Korean invasion for 50 years.

Well, thankfully, in less than two years - let alone fifty - what George Bush would like to see won't really count for all that much.

Still, hey, he's right. It'd be absolutely great if Iraq suddenly turned into an affluent, stable, homogeneous society whose primary security concerns came from outside its borders!

All we need is an infinite number of magic pixies!

Really, the only reason this story matters is that it suggests that after six years in office, President Bush really doesn't have an intuitive understanding of what makes Iraq broken - and, maybe more to the point, that he doesn't understand how the Iraqis themselves are likely to feel about hearing the American mouthpiece in chief say he wants to retain military primacy in their country for basically the rest of their lives. It might be even more stupid than "Bring them on!" was, back in the day, if more subtly so.

Bad news.

True and morally satisfying? What's the catch?

The catch is, of course, with the Bush administration, it might not matter.

Still, for the record: torture isn't just morally repugnant, it's apparently isn't all that useful.

As the Bush administration completes secret new rules governing interrogations, a group of experts advising the intelligence agencies are arguing that the harsh techniques used since the 2001 terrorist attacks are outmoded, amateurish and unreliable.

The psychologists and other specialists, commissioned by the Intelligence Science Board, make the case that more than five years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration has yet to create an elite corps of interrogators trained to glean secrets from terrorism suspects.

While billions are spent each year to upgrade satellites and other high-tech spy machinery, the experts say, interrogation methods — possibly the most important source of information on groups like Al Qaeda — are a hodgepodge that date from the 1950s, or are modeled on old Soviet practices.

Some of the study participants argue that interrogation should be restructured using lessons from many fields, including the tricks of veteran homicide detectives, the persuasive techniques of sophisticated marketing and models from American history.

The science board critique comes as ethical concerns about harsh interrogations are being voiced by current and former government officials. The top commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, sent a letter to troops this month warning that “expedient methods” using force violated American values.

In a blistering lecture delivered last month, a former adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called “immoral” some interrogation tactics used by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon.

But in meetings with intelligence officials and in a 325-page initial report completed in December, the researchers have pressed a more practical critique: there is little evidence, they say, that harsh methods produce the best intelligence.

So, there's that.

By the way, at the risk of running right up against Godwin's Law for, I think, the first time in this blog's two-plus year history, let me point your eyes over toward Andrew Sullivan's patch of virtual ground for a short course in the parallel evolution of "enhanced interrogation techniques" in the military practice of Nazi Germany and George W. Bush's America. The Nazis were dealing with paramilitary resistance in Norway, and argued that the absence of uniforms and state-centered command structures made all sorts of dreadfully familiar abuse fair game.

I'm as sure as I can be that the Bush administration isn't intentionally basing its practices on those of Nazi Germany; the point is only that the modern rules of military conduct were originally adopted for very good reasons, and when they're put aside human nature just leads down the same roads over and over again.

Mr. Sullivan wraps his case up with this:

Critics will no doubt say I am accusing the Bush administration of being Hitler. I'm not. There is no comparison between the political system in Germany in 1937 and the U.S. in 2007. What I am reporting is a simple empirical fact: the interrogation methods approved and defended by this president are not new. Many have been used in the past. The very phrase used by the president to describe torture-that-isn't-somehow-torture - "enhanced interrogation techniques" - is a term originally coined by the Nazis. The techniques are indistinguishable. The methods were clearly understood in 1948 as war-crimes. The punishment for them was death.

As far as I can tell, that really is all true.

Just something to consider the next time you find yourself watching a Republican presidential debate.

Five rich men have spoken!

Hey, ladies! If you can't establish what all your co-workers are making and file a complaint about any discrimination in salary you perceive within your first 180 days at a job, Sam Alito and his friends say you deserve to be billing at sixty percent! Oh, and remember: be careful with abortions, because you don't really understand what you're doing.

Our Supreme Court, my (American) friends.

That said, there is another remedy for this discrimination case - though I don't really understand how it works. Congress, with Hillary Clinton on point, can still swoop in and save the day:

The impact of the decision on women may be somewhat limited by the availability of another federal law against sex discrimination in the workplace, the Equal Pay Act, which does not contain the 180-day requirement. Ms. Ledbetter initially included an Equal Pay Act complaint, but did not pursue it. That law has additional procedural hurdles and a low damage cap that excludes punitive damages. It does not cover discrimination on the basis of race or Title VII’s other protected categories.

In her opinion, Justice Ginsburg invited Congress to overturn the decision, as it did 15 years ago with a series of Supreme Court rulings on civil rights. “Once again, the ball is in Congress’s court,” she said. Within hours, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, who is seeking the Democratic nomination, announced her intention to submit such a bill.

This seems like a no-brainer, if you're not a political throwback. The hundred eighty-day line is painfully arbitrary, and as far as I can tell, common practice has indeed been to ignore it. Anyone who steps up to defend the Court's decision isn't going to be able to do so very rationally, and they'll be risking the wrath of half (and more) of the electorate as they try.

Awkward news for Ehud Olmert.

Labour's internal elections seem to promise a shake-up in Israel's wider governing coalition. Nothing's settled yet, but:

Israel's Labor Party on Monday ousted Amir Peretz, its populist leader sharply criticized for his role as defense minister during last summer's Lebanon war, in a primary election with implications for the durability of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's strained governing coalition.

But a strong turnout among the party's divided rank and file produced no clear winner, setting the stage for a runoff election in two weeks to select the leader of Israel's second-largest parliamentary faction.

Results released early Tuesday morning showed Ehud Barak, a former prime minister, and Ami Ayalon, a former chief of Israel's state security service, the Shin Bet, at the top of the five-person field. Neither candidate -- each a former senior military commander of European descent who personifies the roots of Israel's founding political movement -- reached the 40 percent threshold needed to avoid a second round of voting.

Ayalon has pledged to leave Olmert's coalition if chosen to head the party, while Barak, who is not an elected member of parliament, has said he would work to replace the highly unpopular prime minister without collapsing the government.

Ehud Barak is, of course, the man on the Israeli side of the line who found himself in the awkward position of being in charge of the government when the Oslo Accords melted down. [The Israeli electorate pounded the hell out of him in 2001, but if Ariel Sharon could come back from the wilderness, you've got to think anyone can.] Ami Ayalon, on the other hand, seems to be fairly new to Israeli politics - at least, as a politician - but he seems to've made quite a stir since his official entry into the game. I'm kind of baffled at his apparently cherished notion of the peace camp reaching out to the settlers, but . . . well, I don't live there, so maybe I'm missing something in the big picture.

Though, frankly, I doubt it.

Looking through the soft veil of abstraction, it's kind of a shame to see the European block reassert its control over the party - Amir Peretz's Moroccan ancestry made him a real rarity at the upper levels of the Israeli state - but I'm not seriously going to argue for continuing the reign of anyone at all involved in last summer's debacle in Lebanon, let alone the guy who was Mr. Olmert's Minister of Defense. Labour desperately needs a reboot, and leadership with actual confidence and passion, and I hope whichever one of these guys gets the leadership gig will somehow find it in himself to be revolutionary. And smart.

That said, there's a real danger that all this will lead to Binyamin Netanyahu clawing his way back to power - if Labour forces new elections, polls seem to suggest that the Likud will come out ahead - and though Mr. Olmert has managed to be reckless to the point of incompetence, I still tend to think of him as the lesser danger to the region's long-term well-being.

Maybe eighty percent of the time, anyway.

But, anyway, Israel needs a choice that's neither Ehud Olmert or Bibi Netanyahu, and that brings us back to Labour getting its shit together. Here's hoping it's done astonishingly quickly.

I hate it when things are too dark for schadenfreude.

Over in Japan, Shinzo Abe's Agriculture Minister hanged himself rather than testify about allegations of embezzlement, "bid-rigging," and various other forms of malfeasance. [Mr. Abe had been his most prominent defender as other members in the LDP (to say nothing of the wider Japanese political world) had demanded his resignation.] Suicide's a horrible, and not infrequent, consequence of revealed misdoing in a culture where public shame has sharp teeth, and . . . well, there is no "and." I just hope Mr. Matsuoka's family can heal from it.

Meanwhile, over where bad actions and public humiliation are treated somewhat differently, rumors from the Justice Department suggest that Alberto Gonzales has been using federal resources to hunt Democrats for sport. When asked to comment on the matter, Mr. Gonzales said he couldn't recall, and then flashed a pistol at Henry Waxman and silently mouthed the words "You're next, hippie boy."

Remembering Memorial Day.

Just in passing - of all the commemorations I came across online yesterday, I think Andrew Sullivan's approach was the one that touched me most. He threw in a few words to grease the wheels, but most of what he did boils down to posting seven newspaper photos - moments and faces from the modern American military.

If you're interested, check here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Joe Klein on Iran, Dick Cheney, and what's what.

The first "what" in "what's what" possibly being "demonstrable insanity."

I can confirm, through military and intelligence sources, part of Steve Clemons' account of Cheney's crazed bellicosity regarding Iran. In fact, having just received a second-source confirmation of the following story, I was intending to post it today:

Last December, as Rumsfeld was leaving, President Bush met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff in "The Tank," the secure room in the Pentagon where the Joint Chiefs discuss classified matters of national security. Bush asked the Chiefs about the wisdom of a troop "surge" in Iraq. They were unanimously opposed. Then Bush asked about the possibility of a successful attack on Iran's nuclear capability. He was told that the U.S. could launch a devastating air attack on Iran's government and military, wiping out the Iranian air force, the command and control structure and some of the more obvious nuclear facilities. But the Chiefs were--once again--unanimously opposed to taking that course of action.

Why? Because our intelligence inside Iran is very sketchy. There was no way to be sure that we could take out all of Iran's nuclear facilities. Furthermore, the Chiefs warned, the Iranian response in Iraq and, quite possibly, in terrorist attacks on the U.S. could be devastating. Bush apparently took this advice to heart and went to Plan B--a covert destabilization campaign reported earlier this week by ABC News. If Clemons is right, and I'm pretty sure he is, Cheney is still pushing Plan A.

Nice little review of the stupidity of military action in that last paragraph, though I personally also like to highlight the damage we'd do to our soft power by convincing the moderate Iranian majority that we are in fact psychos. Oh, and there's that whole business of gratuitous loss of life.

Once again, I hope that we hit 2009 and I find myself really, really embarrassed by all the conspiracy theorizing I've promoted on the subject of the prospect of American violence in Iran. I've been publicly worrying for a year or more now, and yet every move from within the administration to pretend there's a casus belli has pretty much splattered against public disinterest and a certain degree of actual scrutiny: granted.

And yet there's no real suggestion out there that Dick Cheney isn't still nuts. The reality based community is still flagging new explosions of nuttiness every time the man opens his mouth, and the pro-Cheney camp doesn't argue we're misinterpreting it; they just love it for what it is.

Moreover, we're in the middle of a squall of weirdness. You've got ABC announcing there's a nonlethal campaign underway against the Iranian government/nuclear plan, and you've got the White House refusing to play demagogue over it. Is it just me, or does this seem like it might be a little trick to ratchet up tensions and undermine the position of the relatively non-crazy anti-nuclear proliferation contingent?

So, hey, let the watchword still be vigilance. Kudos here to Joe Klein for bringing it to Time.

Ah, crap. [Cheney edition.]

The following is taken whole from Steve Clemons' incredibly good blog:

There is a race currently underway between different flanks of the administration to determine the future course of US-Iran policy.

On one flank are the diplomats, and on the other is Vice President Cheney's team and acolytes -- who populate quite a wide swath throughout the American national security bureaucracy.

The Pentagon and the intelligence establishment are providing support to add muscle and nuance to the diplomatic effort led by Condi Rice, her deputy John Negroponte, Under Secretary of State R. Nicholas Burns, and Legal Adviser John Bellinger. The support that Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and CIA Director Michael Hayden are providing Rice's efforts are a complete, 180 degree contrast to the dysfunction that characterized relations between these institutions before the recent reshuffle of top personnel.

However, the Department of Defense and national intelligence sector are also preparing for hot conflict. They believe that they need to in order to convince Iran's various power centers that the military option does exist.

But this is worrisome. The person in the Bush administration who most wants a hot conflict with Iran is Vice President Cheney. The person in Iran who most wants a conflict is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Iran's Revolutionary Guard Quds Force would be big winners in a conflict as well -- as the political support that both have inside Iran has been flagging.

Multiple sources have reported that a senior aide on Vice President Cheney's national security team has been meeting with policy hands of the American Enterprise Institute, one other think tank, and more than one national security consulting house and explicitly stating that Vice President Cheney does not support President Bush's tack towards Condoleezza Rice's diplomatic efforts and fears that the President is taking diplomacy with Iran too seriously.

This White House official has stated to several Washington insiders that Cheney is planning to deploy an "end run strategy" around the President if he and his team lose the policy argument.

The thinking on Cheney's team is to collude with Israel, nudging Israel at some key moment in the ongoing standoff between Iran's nuclear activities and international frustration over this to mount a small-scale conventional strike against Natanz using cruise missiles (i.e., not ballistic missiles).

This strategy would sidestep controversies over bomber aircraft and overflight rights over other Middle East nations and could be expected to trigger a sufficient Iranian counter-strike against US forces in the Gulf -- which just became significantly larger -- as to compel Bush to forgo the diplomatic track that the administration realists are advocating and engage in another war.

There are many other components of the complex game plan that this Cheney official has been kicking around Washington. The official has offered this commentary to senior staff at AEI and in lunch and dinner gatherings which were to be considered strictly off-the-record, but there can be little doubt that the official actually hopes that hawkish conservatives and neoconservatives share this information and then rally to this point of view. This official is beating the brush and doing what Joshua Muravchik has previously suggested -- which is to help establish the policy and political pathway to bombing Iran.

The zinger of this information is the admission by this Cheney aide that Cheney himself is frustrated with President Bush and believes, much like Richard Perle, that Bush is making a disastrous mistake by aligning himself with the policy course that Condoleezza Rice, Bob Gates, Michael Hayden and McConnell have sculpted.

According to this official, Cheney believes that Bush can not be counted on to make the "right decision" when it comes to dealing with Iran and thus Cheney believes that he must tie the President's hands.

On Tuesday evening, i spoke with a former top national intelligence official in this Bush administration who told me that what I was investigating and planned to report on regarding Cheney and the commentary of his aide was "potentially criminal insubordination" against the President. I don't believe that the White House would take official action against Cheney for this agenda-mongering around Washington -- but I do believe that the White House must either shut Cheney and his team down and give them all garden view offices so that they can spend their days staring out their windows with not much to do or expect some to begin to think that Bush has no control over his Vice President.

It is not that Cheney wants to bomb Iran and Bush doesn't, it is that Cheney is saying that Bush is making a mistake and thus needs to have the choices before him narrowed.

Y'know, not to minimize the fact that Mr. Cheney is a belligerent megalomaniac with no regard whatsoever for constitutional government as the Framers intended it, but I think it really is that Cheney wants to bomb Iran. It doesn't matter that much if he takes more illegal and/or unethical roads than usual to get to that violence, because he'll never be punished for it - Mr. Bush would never even admit to being railroaded, given the damage it would do to his fantasy of himself as "Decider" - but the consequences of actual war would be immediate and profound. I love our system of government more than most, but I think damage that might be done to it here - though certainly grounds for impeachment and immortal shame - is of less concern than the prospect of kicking the Middle East nine-tenths of the way to catastrophic collapse.

But, hey, if making Mr. Cheney fear for his own ass is the way to go . . . .

Ah, crap. [Overseas edition.]

Lebanon looks more and more like hell:

Fierce fighting continued for the third straight day in northern Lebanon today, as the Lebanese Army continued battling militants holed up in a refugee camp on the outskirts of Tripoli, ending a brief cease-fire with a barrage of shelling and gunfire that hampered rescue and aid efforts and raised political tensions in other parts of the country.

Plumes of black smoke continued to billow out of the Nahr el-Bared refugee camp as a United Nations aid convoy delivered much needed food and medical supplies into the camp, but the convoy was attacked by mortar fire, sending aid workers scrambling for shelter and hampering the aid effort. No one was injured by the attack, but three damaged United Nations trucks were abandoned in flames, one official said.

The fierce fighting between the army and Fatah al-Islam, a militia thought to be linked to Al Qaeda, continued uninterrupted for much of Sunday and Monday before a brief lull on Monday night, when numerous injured were evacuated. The violence resumed early today until a new cease-fire took hold at 2:30 p.m. local time for about two hours.

It was not immediately clear who attacked the United Nations convoy, but the Lebanese Army denied it had shelled the trucks.

Up to 40,000 Palestinians have been trapped inside the camp with no water, electricity and dwindling supplies of food as the shelling continued, presenting a humanitarian crisis for aid groups that have been unable to enter the camp for fear of being attacked.

I have nothing productive to add.

Democrats: spineless weasels.

Okay, I'm cranky, and I know it's showing. The domestic news of the day is this:

Congressional Democrats relented today on their insistence that a war spending measure sought by President Bush also set a date for withdrawing troops from Iraq. The decision to back down, described by senior lawmakers and aides, was a wrenching reversal for some Democrats, who saw their election triumph as a call to force an end to the war. A Democratic effort to include timelines prompted Mr. Bush’s veto of the original bill last month, producing a political impasse.

“We don’t have a veto-proof Congress,” said Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader.

No, they don't.

That said, war - any war - is the most serious business of government, and the Democrats have their majority in large part because the American people passionately disagree with the way the one in Iraq is being conducted by the president and his horde. A democratic republic isn't meant to be a perfect expression of the collective will of its citizens, but their views should at least matter. If neither the minority party nor the majority party is willing to stand up and articulate the popular position in times of national crisis, then, really, what's the damn point?

It's another win for the monarchic presidency, and I'm getting very sick of those.

Metacoverage.

I give you Kevin Drum citing Juan Cole:

Juan Cole notes today that of the six men who actually run Iraq, one of them is in Iran getting chemotherapy for his lung cancer; one is in hiding; and one, improbably, is in the U.S. seeking treatment for his obesity . . . .

Will Iraq disintegrate this summer? Stay tuned.

Light blogging night.

Yeah, yeah. Bitch all you like, but I put this to you - the X-Men: First Class Special showed up at my doorstep today, and after experiencing a little something I like to call perfect joy*, I don't see why I should be required to dwell on things that piss me off.

. . .

Fine, fine. In the name of social responsibility, I refer you to the very excellent speculative Comey timeline over at TPM Muckraker. As the NSA story (hopefully) continues to unfold, basic tools for keeping it straight may become very desirable indeed - and this one has the virtue of being reasonably concise and engagingly written.

Go! Scoot! Leave me to my "Magneto at the Coffee-a-Go-Go" bliss!





*Okay, it's not perfect joy. Still, bringing Jeff Parker, Mike Allred, Colleen Coover and Paul freakin' Smith together for a comic book with a big X on it and no trace of emo . . . well, I never thought I'd live to see the day.

Tragedy and farce.

Now, the grown-up in me is flagging this article on James Comey's testimony because it puts George W. Bush's fingerprints directly on the illegal wiretapping mess. Assuming American political culture ever shakes off its current disease, there are going to be a lot of people on the right who'll find this hard to defend, and will probably try to ensure that all the blame falls on Alberto Gonzales. Given that Mr. Gonzales has probably destroyed his reputation for generations to come through his clever mix of corruption, poor management, and ludicrously non-responsive testimony, there's going to be a tendency to assume he deserves all the blame he gets.

Not so! He couldn't be as awful as he is if there weren't equally awful people protecting him from on high!

So, again, let's remember: the president is implicated. He's not just an ignorant patsy. Ignorant, possibly; patsy, no.

Anyway, meanspirited as it may be, I'd call that argument for making this post my more mature one - it's all about the thoroughness. The more frivolous side of my character, on the other hand, is all caught up in the delight of discovering that the people who've been running this country into the ground for the last few years really do on occasion live their lives like a bad sitcom.

In this episode, Alberto and Andy discover that mean stick-in-the-mud James Comey isn't willing to sign off on their surveillance program because his lawyers have told him it's illegal. But, wait! There's a loophole! Comey's boss is in the hospital, doped out of his mind! If they can get to him before Comey does, he may be stoned enough to give them what they want! Quick: have a car race!

Think I'm kidding?

Mr. Comey, the former No. 2 official in the Justice Department, said the crisis began when he refused to sign a presidential order reauthorizing the program, which allowed monitoring of international telephone calls and e-mail of people inside the United States who were suspected of having terrorist ties. He said he made his decision after the department’s Office of Legal Counsel, based on an extensive review, concluded that the program did not comply with the law. At the time, Mr. Comey was acting attorney general because Mr. Ashcroft had been hospitalized for emergency gall bladder surgery.

. . .

Mr. Comey said that on the evening of March 10, 2004, Mr. Gonzales and Andrew H. Card Jr., then Mr. Bush’s chief of staff, tried to bypass him by secretly visiting Mr. Ashcroft. Mr. Ashcroft was extremely ill and disoriented, Mr. Comey said, and his wife had forbidden any visitors.

Mr. Comey said that when a top aide to Mr. Ashcroft alerted him about the pending visit, he ordered his driver to rush him to George Washington University Hospital with emergency lights flashing and a siren blaring, to intercept the pair. They were seeking his signature because authority for the program was to expire the next day.

Mr. Comey said he phoned Mr. Mueller, who agreed to meet him at the hospital. Once there, Mr. Comey said he “literally ran up the stairs.” At his request, Mr. Mueller ordered the F.B.I. agents on Mr. Ashcroft’s security detail not to evict Mr. Comey from the room if Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Card objected to his presence.

Mr. Comey said he arrived first in the darkened room, in time to brief Mr. Ashcroft, who he said seemed barely conscious. Before Mr. Ashcroft became ill, Mr. Comey said the two men had talked and agreed that the program should not be renewed.

When the White House officials appeared minutes later, Mr. Gonzales began to explain to Mr. Ashcroft why they were there. Mr. Comey said Mr. Ashcroft rose weakly from his hospital bed, but in strong and unequivocal terms, refused to approve the eavesdropping program.

“I was angry,” Mr. Comey told the committee. “ I had just witnessed an effort to take advantage of a very sick man, who did not have the powers of the attorney general because they had been transferred to me. I thought he had conducted himself in a way that demonstrated a strength I had never seen before, but still I thought it was improper.”

Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Card quickly departed, but Mr. Comey said he soon got an angry phone call from Mr. Card, demanding that he come to the White House. Mr. Comey said he replied: “After what I just witnessed, I will not meet with you without a witness, and I intend that witness to be the solicitor general of the United States.”

Cue laugh track!

Or, y'know, not.

Impending nuclear wasteland update.

Remember a few hours ago, when I said that the collapse of the Musharraf regime in Pakistan scared me more than just about any other geopolitical shakeup I could imagine? Well, a blog post at the New Republic's Plank directed me to a ripening (from mid-March) story from the Times that suggests I may have fallen for old school disinformation.

This is actually quite possible, insofar as I'm a notorious idiot.

The long, reassuring stretch reads like this:

The fear within Washington that Islamic extremism has become a dominant force in Pakistan has been stoked in part by Mr. Musharraf himself. Some analysts say his warnings are used to maintain a steady flow of American aid and keep at bay demands from Washington for democratic reforms. He often invokes the dangers of Islamic radicalism when meeting American officials in Washington and Islamabad, and his narrow escape in two assassination attempts is frequently cited by President Bush as evidence of his tenuous grip on power.

While the Islamists would surely take power in any way possible, an examination of polling data and recent election results — however suspect in a less than democratic country — provides little evidence that Islamists have enough support to take over the country. If anything, they would likely control only select areas.

The last time Pakistan went to the polls in 2002, religious political parties received just 11 percent of the vote, compared with more than 28 percent won by the secular party led by Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister.

And that election may have even been a high-water mark for the Islamists, who were capitalizing on surging anti-American sentiment after the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Even though the Iraq war has also inflamed anti-Western attitudes, these sentiments do not seem to have translated into electoral gains for Islamist parties.

Islamist politicians received a drubbing in local elections in 2005, gaining less support than expected in their power base in the tribal areas. In September, a poll by the International Republican Institute, a respected organization affiliated with the Republican Party that helps build democratic institutions in foreign countries, found that just 5.2 percent of respondents would vote for the main religious party, Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, in national parliamentary elections.

Although the poll found that this party was the most popular in Baluchistan, the southwestern province where Taliban support is strong, Islamist leaders lagged far behind both Mr. Musharraf and Ms. Bhutto, as well as another former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif. It is also thought to be unlikely that a successful attempt on Mr. Musharraf’s life would mean wholesale changes to the power structure of Pakistani politics.

For decades, the military has been the most dominant institution in Pakistan. If Mr. Musharraf were to fall to an assassin’s bullet, American diplomatic and intelligence officials say, it is unlikely that there would be mass uprisings in Lahore and Karachi, or that a religious leader in the Taliban mold would rise to power.

“I am not particularly worried about an extremist government coming to power and getting hold of nuclear weapons,” said Robert Richer, who was associate director of operations in 2004 and 2005 for the Central Intelligence Agency. “If something happened to Musharraf tomorrow, another general would step in.”

Based on the succession plan, the vice chief of the army, Gen. Ahsan Saleem Hyat, would take over as the leader of the army and Mohammedmian Soomro, an ex-banker, would become president.

General Hyat, who is secular like Mr. Musharraf, would hold the real power.

Now, there are no guarantees, and when we're talking about nuclear powers nobody should be in too much of a hurry for radical change. Still, for anyone who worried that we were one bad day in the Asian subcontinent from waking up in a Road Warrior movie . . . well, maybe you can relax a little, after all.

. . .

Ha! Just kidding! Worry about Iran, instead!

Inspectors for the International Atomic Energy Agency have concluded that Iran appears to have solved most of its technological problems and is now beginning to enrich uranium on a far larger scale than before, according to the agency’s top officials.

The findings may change the calculus of diplomacy in Europe and in Washington, which aimed to force a suspension of Iran’s enrichment activities in large part to prevent it from learning how to produce weapons-grade material.

In a short-notice inspection of Iran’s operations in the main nuclear facility at Natanz on Sunday, conducted in advance of a report to the United Nations Security Council due early next week, the inspectors found that Iranian engineers were already using roughly 1,300 centrifuges and were producing fuel suitable for nuclear reactors, according to diplomats and nuclear experts here.

Until recently, the Iranians were having difficulty keeping the delicate centrifuges spinning at the tremendous speeds necessary to make nuclear fuel and were often running them empty or not at all.

Now, those roadblocks appear to have been surmounted. “We believe they pretty much have the knowledge about how to enrich,” said Mohammed ElBaradei, the director general of the energy agency, who clashed with the Bush administration four years ago when he declared that there was no evidence that Iraq had resumed its nuclear program. “From now on, it is simply a question of perfecting that knowledge. People will not like to hear it, but that’s a fact.”

These guys really make it hard for those of us who argue against bombing junkets. The Israelis are going to freak, and I can't really blame them.

Not to say that I think Iran would use its nukes. The people who run the place are zealots, but they're not unconcerned with their own survival; the only war they've directly involved themselves in since Ayatollah Khomeini brought his tyranny to town was started by Saddam Hussein. They back Hezbollah - and all that that entails - but they've always stayed well inside all the lines that guarantee their survival. They're bad, not crazy.

That said, once you bring nukes into the picture, it becomes way too easy to imagine stupid mistakes leading to days worse than September 11 - and, again, the guys that run Iran really aren't very good at it to begin with. I still believe firmly that military action is a bad idea; we can't permanently destroy their weapons-making capacity (or even be sure we know where it all is), but we can kill a lot of people, and go a long way toward convincing the citizenry en masse that the craziest elements of their government are the only ones who'll stand up to the Western menace.

What I hope to see, instead, is some hardcore pushing on Russia and China to stop giving Iran diplomatic cover through all this. I was down on the election of Mr. Sarkozy, but if by some chance he wants to help sway Europe toward a firm stance on this, he'll go a long way toward making me feel that I've been unfair.

A good paragraph and change from Joe Klein.

On Pakistan:

I'm more concerned that Pakistan has a nuclear weapon and an unstable "moderate" government than I am that Iran has a stable extremist government and no nuclear weapon (yet). With Al Qaeda Central operating in the the hinterlands and, more important, with some of the generals who run the intelligence (ISI) radical Salafist sympathizers, it's been clear for years that Pakistan is one bullet away from becoming an unstable extremist government with a nuclear weapon. And things seem to be getting worse: This assassination and the weekend rioting in Karachi may be very significant. A people's movement for justice may well compel a military backlash.
...Which is why we need a serious discussion about the rebalancing of U.S. foreign security obsessions north and east from the I-countries (Iraq and Iran) to the stans (Afghani and Paki).

The only problem I can see with this is that this country hasn't had a serious discussion about anything since Watergate, and this administration's foreign policy instincts are unlikely to lead to any positive change anyway.

That said, put me down in the "Pakistan is the scariest place in the world" camp - an active nuclear weapons program plus a military establishment rife with Taliban-esque thugs and possessed of no great love for civilian control of government and constitutional succession equals total disaster waiting to happen. Unlike some, who are probably more morally in the right, I'm generally sympathetic to arguments for keeping Pervez Musharraf propped up. I'm not proud of my uncharacteristically pro-dictatorial stance, but I'm assuming that the practical alternative isn't pure democracy so much as a coup from someone crazier.

Still, the man's not immortal, and even if he weathers the current crisis - which is by no means guaranteed - he's not going to be able to cling to the reins forever. What happens when he goes? And will it all be worse for his having held on (with our support, tacit and otherwise) for so long?

It sure would be nice if we could all come to some kind of informed agreement. Basically unimaginable, but nice.

Rare good news from our war zones.

No, seriously. Looks like one of Afghanistan's most dangerous men, the Taliban's Mullah Dadullah Akhund is now dead - a human tragedy, but hopefully a military and social boon (in a way the death of, say, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq was frankly never going to be).

Meanwhile, in Mesopotamia, though the political process is still - as far as I can tell - hopelessly compromised, we can at least take some comfort from the fact that the biggest Shi'ite players on the field have apparently renounced Iranian-style (and, indeed, Iranian-based) theocracy in favor of something more Iraqi and nationalistic. I don't suppose it'll cool many tempers in the short-term, but I suspect - or, at least, want to believe - it's good news for whatever Iraqi state coalesces from the chaos in a decade or two.

Here's hoping, anyway.

This just in: wealthy European man tells Latin American poor to get right with God!

Social justice is a non-starter, says Pope Benedict!

Ah, yes. A flashback to the heady early days of the Wall, when I devoted pages at a time to the troubling social consequences of the ex-Cardinal Ratzinger's papacy! [Oh, mature attention span, how little I appreciated you before you were gone!]

In this degenerate modern age, I'll note only how unsettling it is for a man of such a relatively sheltered background - middle class childhood (with, admittedly, all the distortions inherent in living in Nazi Germany in the `30s and early `40s), followed by entry into the seminary at 17 or 18, followed by an entire life in the Church and in academia - to trundle off to face the working poor and dismiss hopes of better conditions with this:

“What is real?” he mused in the speech, hours before heading back to Rome after five days in Brazil, the world’s most populous Catholic country. “Are only material goods, social and economic and political problems ‘reality’?” Without agreeing first on God, he argued to the bishops, society is unable to tackle the problems of poverty and social injustice.

“Just structures are,” he said, “an indispensable condition for a just society, but they neither rise nor function without a moral consensus in society on fundamental values.”

“Where God is absent — God with the human face of Jesus Christ — these values fail to show themselves with their full force: nor does a consensus arise concerning them,” he said.

“I do not mean that nonbelievers cannot live a lofty and exemplary morality; I am only saying that a society in which God is absent will not find the necessary consensus on moral values or the strength to live according to the model of these values.”

He may sincerely believe that these people are screwed until they're under a proper Ratzingerian pseudo-theocracy, or maybe he just wanted to send a pointed message to the local bishops that his old disdain for liberation theology hasn't faded, but . . . well, one could wish that he'd approached the topic with a bit more empathy. Hell, a bit more humility.

By the way, have I mentioned how irritated I become by political leaders who twist history around and expect the world to shut up and take it?

Later, in his speech to the clergy at the large shrine to the Virgin Mary here, the pope also offered what amounted to a revisionist history of the church’s origins in Latin America.

The standard view in the region is that the Spanish and Portuguese conquerors, accompanied by the clergy, imposed Catholicism in a ruinous process that left native populations, as a common phrase puts it, “between the cross and the sword.”

Some modern-day Latin American theologians have lamented the destruction of indigenous civilizations and sought to incorporate elements of those cultures into the Mass as one way of making amends. But in a statement likely to be controversial in countries with large Indian populations, including Mexico, Peru, and Ecuador, Benedict rejected that approach.

“In effect, the proclamation of Jesus and of his Gospel did not at any point involve an alienation of the pre-Columbus cultures, nor was it the imposition of a foreign culture,” he said.

Again, I think there's probably a degree of sincerity here that I don't take for granted when, say, Shinzo Abe talks trash about Korean comfort women when we all know he knows better. I suspect Pope Benedict is so confident in the universality of the Catholic Christian message that on some level he honestly can't conceive of it as a disruptive force - but, seriously, for a man in his position that's a failing. It suggests he doesn't fully understand the power he commands - and, again, it smacks of an inability to put himself in the shoes of the vulnerable and the disenfranchised.

These are not uncommon traits in popes, granted. Still, it would be good for the world if the weight of history started to make them a bit less likely.

Dahlia Lithwick's beautiful snark.

From Slate:

Alberto Gonzales is in his happy place. He enters the hearing room in the Rayburn Building for his testimony before the House judiciary committee smiling the smile of a man who sleeps well each night, in the warm glow of the president's love. Gone is the testy, defensive Gonzales who testified last month before the Senate. Today's attorney general breezes into the chamber with the certain knowledge that having bottomed out in April, he has nothing left to prove. His only role in this scandal is as decoy: He's the guy who runs out in front of the hunters and draws their fire so nobody pays any attention to what's happening at the White House.

Gonzales seems to have made his peace with this. No more angry outbursts, no bitter attempts at self-justification. Instead, the AG answers some questions with a giggle and most others with the same old catchphrases we've heard so often: He has consistently failed to investigate any wrongdoing at the Justice Department out of "deference to the integrity of the ongoing investigations." The decisions about which U.S. attorneys made Kyle Sampson's magic list were the "consensus recommendations of the senior leadership of the department." Over and again, ever in identical language, Gonzales "accepts full responsibility for the decision" just as he insists that he played only a "limited role" in the decision-making. The fact that the attorney general can't even be bothered to pull out a thesaurus after all these weeks—even if only to create the illusion that these nonanswers come from him as opposed to a list of pre-approved talking points—reveals just how little he cares about what Congress and the public think of him anymore.

The House Democrats are furious. To them, there is only one plausible explanation for what happened to the eight (now nine?) fired U.S. attorneys. There is only one narrative that works with the facts. The White House wanted party loyalists placed in either key battleground states, or in states where Republicans were being investigated or they thought Democrats should have been. Gonzales rolled out the welcome mat at the Justice Department and told them to install whomever they wanted while he played hearts on his computer. If Gonzales truly wants to rebut that narrative, he needs only to offer some plausible alternative. Anything at all. But he doesn't. He offers only distractions.

The bad news? Those lovely, cutting paragraphs are probably as close to a public reckoning as Mr. Gonzales is going to have to endure - at least, in the short term.

At first, I honestly believed the blatant politicization at Justice would require a public scapegoat - and maybe if Mr. Gonzales were less close to the president it might've happened. Maybe not, though; maybe getting another anti-Constitutional sycophant through the confirmation process just would have been too daunting. Maybe the White House is just confident that the public won't understand or care.

Anyway, there's a lot that's striking about the path Mr. Gonzales and his patrons have chosen to take. Even in the Bush era, this is really surprisingly ballsy: they're not even making a pretense of believing in effective, unbiased governance anymore. If the Justice Department really mattered to these people as an institution, the damage taken to its reputation and its morale and its basic credibility would require immediate, frantic treatment. As it is, though, its political role - covering the administration's ass, basically - is still deliverable, and that's what matters. That's apparently all that matters.

I'm sure they're counting on Republicans in the House, and on Fox News, to muddy the waters. There's no sex involved, and hirings and firings in Justice are probably remote and unimportant to most Americans anyway. Plus, hey, there's nobody in the executive running for re-election in `08! There probably are no negative consequences stemming from this that these people can't ignore.

Whatever. Fact: Alberto Gonzales very much deserves to be impeached. The Justice Department can't be allowed to become an appendage on the vote-fixing arm of the Republican Party; it's dragged us embarrassingly close (even closer than we were a year ago) to banana republic status.

Unfortunately, the Democrats don't have bulletproof supermajorities, or probably even a whole lot of political will, and God knows there aren't many heroes left among the Congressional Republicans. So Mr. Gonzales will presumably win out, and we'll continue in our decline; the next Republicans to take the White House will probably start with all this corrosion as standard operating procedure, and will innovate from there.

I hope Ms. Lithwick is up to the task of dressing them down, `cause that's one of the few bright spots I can imagine coming.

Not that I get a vote, but . . .

One interesting little tidbit was mentioned on CNN - Jack Cafferty's segment, I think - earlier tonight, but I have to thank the Hullabaloo squad for providing a link to some `net-based words on the matter.

A majority in the Iraqi parliament has signed on to a Sadrist petition calling on the United States to set some timetables and start pulling out.

This war is costing us a fortune. It's breaking the Army. It's killed thousands of Americans and wounded tens of thousands more, and even those who've gone physically unscathed have put careers and families and just basic peace of mind at risk. And the payoff? Alienating the Muslim world, strategically strengthening lunatics in Iran, making life harder for Israel, and going a long way toward guaranteeing that Osama bin Laden's deranged, nihilistic worldview will find audiences ten or twenty years longer than it might otherwise have done. Maybe it could've gone differently, but it hasn't.

And, still, I've pretty much kept my mouth shut on the subject of unilateral withdrawal - because, basically, I want us to help. If we can stop the Iraqis from sliding any deeper into hell, I'm for it. I may have my doubts about whether or not we can, but I haven't been so sure we can't that I'd shout it from the rooftops; maybe that's even a kind of cowardice. But I haven't really been desperately agitating to leave; whenever I've come close, guilt has slowed me down.

But, look, if a majority of Iraqis want us getting up and going (according to polls), and a majority of Iraqi parliamentarians want the same thing (according to this petition): (1) our presence there simply doesn't have much legitimacy, no matter how much cover the UN gives us, and (2) the odds that we're doing more good than harm are probably a lot lower than we'd like to think. I mean, what have we seen in the last six years that would suggest that George Bush and his national defense team have a better idea of what's good for Iraq than a majority of the people who are actually there? Maybe pulling out would lead to genocide; maybe we'd have to go back. Maybe.

But, for now, where do we get off staying? How do these votes of no confidence not count? I don't think there are good answers.

So: timetables. Now.

Specifically designed to make a bad mood worse.

In a significant change to its movie ratings system, the Motion Picture Association of America on Thursday said portrayals of smoking would be considered alongside sex and violence in assessing the suitability of movies for young viewers. Films that appear to glamorize smoking will risk a more restrictive rating, and descriptions of tobacco use will be added to the increasingly detailed advisories that accompany each rated film.

Antismoking groups, already successful in much of the country in banning smoking in bars, restaurants and other public places, has ratcheted up the pressure on Hollywood in recent years to purge movies of images that might promote tobacco use. Some have even demanded that virtually any film with smoking be rated R, shutting out those under 17 unless they are accompanied by a parent or adult guardian.

Hey, you know what else is a problem? Skin cancer! Let's make any movie in which characters don't wear hats outside NC-17!

Seriously, I don't smoke. I've never wanted to smoke. I do not advocate smoking, nor do I defend it on any grounds other than the fundamental right of the mature human being to screw up. Smoking is a bad idea, and having it less and less prevalent in pop culture is to my mind great.

But ruling that the very sight of it is to all intents and purposes obscene? That falls somewhere between overkill and insanity - and in some cases, I'd call it something even less flattering. Today, in the real world, some people smoke. It can be argued that we don't need to dwell on it, any more than we dwell on, say, defecation - but smoking is a social affectation; it's not healthy, but it's done in public, and it says things about a person's character and habits. Putting it on camera can (and should!) be descriptive rather than propagandistic, and as such it shouldn't be automatically considered improper for popular consumption.

Then, of course, there's the fact that kids see people smoking in real life. It's not like this is going to lead to the measurable social good of making tobacco use unimaginable to the little blighters!

Ngh.

Seriously, I applaud the basic goal here, and I have no problem if parents' groups - or anybody else - want to have mechanisms in place for making noise if smoking is sexed up for the big screen. I don't even mind if a couple of minutes of the increasingly inescapable pre-movie filler suddenly become devoted to pictures of blackened lungs and sobbing orphans; I'm all for actual education! But, please, let's not restrict our ability to give our characters whatever degree of depth their scripts suggest; our movies are small and artificial enough as is.

Whoops.

The Bush administration has withheld a series of e-mails from Congress showing that senior White House and Justice Department officials worked together to conceal the role of Karl Rove in installing Timothy Griffin, a protégé of Rove's, as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas.

From Murray Waas at the National Journal - thanks go to Josh Marshall, Andrew Sullivan, and everybody else I read who's already flagged it. I love the blogosphere sometimes.

Also worth a look, vis-a-vis the stink in Justice, is an editorial in today's Times that nicely encapsulates what we know about the Todd Graves/Bradley Schlozman mess in Missouri. Don't know what I mean? Click and be informed!

We won't have Tony Blair to kick around anymore!

So, here we are at last - he packs up on June 27th, and it seems like a healthy majority of Brits will be happy to see him gone.

Me? I'm not happy, exactly. The George W. Bush era has brought Mr. Blair's faults to the surface - the president just has a knack for things like that - but I can't shake the feeling that almost any modern British PM would have supported American mistakes abroad in almost exactly the same way. What any other modern British PM might not have done was help Northern Ireland along the way. It's time for Mr. Blair to go - in fact, I've thought it was time since he started tinkering with the principle of trial by jury - but I'm not at all sanguine about the U.K.'s chances of finding a replacement that can match Mr. Blair's competence, or even his basic (if occasionally misguided) decency.

[That said, yes, I'm strangely intrigued by David Cameron. This despite the fact that he's a Tory, and therefore has to work three times as hard to prove he's not soulless and cruel.]

Anyway, I look forward to seeing what historians eventually have to say about Mr. Blair. I don't think his mistakes will be erased, but if it's eventually revealed that all the abuse he took in maintaining the trans-Atlantic alliance paid off behind the scenes in, say, keeping President Bush from invading Iran or Syria, his apparent passivity may one day be seen in a more flattering light.

. . .

Come on. There's at least a chance!

Now, back to the outrage!

I refer you to James Fallows' essay on the murder of Tom Wales, and the strange responses of the Bush Justice Department.

In a nutshell, Mr. Wales was a federal prosecutor, and, from all accounts, a passionate advocate for gun control; he's believed to have been killed by the sort of guy even an NRA hand might grudgingly call an extremist. Possibly because of the political messages involved, the Justice Department hasn't been eager to pursue the case - in fact, it didn't even send a representative to Mr. Wales' funeral - and recently Kyle Sampson, Alberto Gonzales' former chief of staff, has mumbled that one of the increasingly legendary fired U.S. attorneys was on the shit list because he was making too big a deal of this specific, potentially awkward crime. It may have been a lie, a clumsy alternative to the ugly truth about other political reasons for the man's dismissal, but it's raising more and more eyebrows as it becomes widely known.

Now, you'll have inferred that the story itself isn't new; I'm pretty sure I started reading about it a week or two back on Talking Points Memo, and the Post ran with it on the middle pages of the A section on Saturday.

But Mr. Fallows knew Tom Wales, and is close to members of his family, and is one of the better wordwrights in American journalism besides. He brings a constructive kind of anger to the account, and . . . well, I encourage you to give his take a look if you have a few minutes. If you'd rather just take the punchline and go, though, I'd say it's this:

John McKay, the U.S. attorney in Seattle who was among the eight dismissed, appeared to have earned the Bush Administration’s hostility in the old-fashioned way: by not filing charges of voter fraud after an extremely close election that went the Democrats’ way. But this weekend’s story in the Washington Post, based on testimony by Alberto Gonzales’s former deputy Kyle Sampson, suggests that McKay’s problems may have begun with his determination to keep on pushing to find Tom Wales’s killer.

If this is so, it is obscene. Tom Wales represented everything the American public can hope for from its public servants. He made less money than he might have, in order to enforce the rules that made Americans’ lives in general safer, more predictable, and more honorable. He showed that people with many options in life could choose a career in public service. He was a wonderful man. For his commitment, he was murdered, which was in a deep sense a crime against the entire public. The public in general has no way to punish or avenge that crime, but the law enforcement system does. If an administration has chosen to neglect that effort because – as has now been suggested – it didn’t want to ruffle feathers in the pro-gun camp, that is as low an act as any we have heard of in modern politics. It would take us back to, say, the murders in Philadelphia, Mississippi more than 40 years ago — but with the local officials trying their best to find the truth and the federal government covering up a crime.

I hope it proves not to be true – and that the dismissal of McKay was “simply” a matter of strong-arm partisan politics. That is what now passes for “good news” when it comes to the Administration’s approach to the rule of law.

`Nuff said.

When the National Guard's not in the nation.

Belatedly: I wish I had something useful to add about the tragedy in Kansas, but I have no personal stake and most conclusions I could see myself drawing seem presumptuous, in one way or another. To anyone who reads this who knows someone lost or someone hurt, I can only say I'm sorry for it.

My heart also goes out to members of the Guard serving in Iraq; politics notwithstanding, I'm sure they wish - in some cases desperately - that they could help carry the load at home. For some of them, that's got to be the reason they signed up in the first place.

Editorializing done right.

From the Times:

There is nothing “conservative” or “tough on terrorism” in selectively stripping people of their rights. Suspending habeas corpus is an extreme notion on the radical fringes of democratic philosophy. As four retired military chief prosecutors — from the Navy, the Marines and the Army — pointed out to Congress, holding prisoners without access to courts merely feeds Al Qaeda’s propaganda machine, increases the risk to the American military and sets a precedent by which other governments could justify detaining American civilians without charges or appeal.

Consider some of the other wild-eyed liberals calling on Congress to restore habeas corpus: William Sessions, director of the F.B.I. under the first President Bush; David Keene, head of the American Conservative Union; the National Association of Evangelicals; David Neff, editor of Christianity Today, founded by the Rev. Billy Graham; a long list of other evangelical leaders and scholars; and nearly two dozen sitting and retired federal judges.

There are a half-dozen bills in the House and the Senate that would restore habeas corpus. But the Democratic leadership has not found a way to bring the issue to a vote. The first vehicle is the Defense Department’s budget authorization bill. But Representative Ike Skelton, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, chose not to include habeas corpus in his baseline version of the measure, known as the chairman’s mark, which will be taken up by the committee today.

We hope habeas will be added to the bill by the committee, or that other sponsors of measures to restore the ancient right, including Representatives John Conyers Jr. of Michigan and Jerrold Nadler of New York, and Senators Christopher Dodd of Connecticut and Patrick Leahy of Vermont, will find ways to bring their bills to a vote.

The Democratic majority has a long list of wrongs to right from six years of Mr. Bush’s leadership. We are sympathetic to their concerns about finding a way to revive habeas corpus that won’t die in committee or be subject to a presidential veto of a larger bill. But lawmakers sometimes have to stand on principle and trust the voters to understand.

This is one of those times.

Q, as the kids say, FT.

Good luck, Sarko.

The French elections are over, and the guy that frightened me most won - it's a disturbingly familiar feeling, and not one I enjoy, but . . . enh. I can hardly blame French voters for wanting somebody whom Jacques Chirac apparently loathed.

I'd say more if I had more to say, but right now the spirit is a long way away from moving me. My right ear is (1) deaf and (2) increasingly uncomfortable, and my throat's not being a whole lot of fun either. All these conditions, I have reason to believe, are transitory, but, man, they're wearing me down while they last.

I think I may nap now. Later, world.

The Times does (itself) good.

Just a quick note from the age of meta-media observation: the New York Times has announced that its next ombudsman is Clark Hoyt, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and - oddly, more important to me - formerly the Washington editor for Knight-Ridder. Just for the record, I don't think Arthur Sulzberger and his team could've gotten anyone with more credibility in this particular day and age than this; Mr. Hoyt and his reporters seem to have been more consistent and more brave in standing up to administration and media pressures in the first years of the Bush era than any other news outlet in the country, and whatever informal oversight he can bring to the Times is just hugely welcome. The papers gets real credit from me for this; I hope it's the start of something good.

Our democracy in action!

[Unless you're not American. Then you're off the hook, you lucky bastard.

[Though, of course, President Bush still has almost two years in which he can decide to invade you. Don't get cocky.]

Anyway, we return again to the great and noble Republican battle against voter fraud:

Accusations about voter fraud seemed to fly from every direction in Missouri before last year’s elections. State and national Republicans leaders fretted that dead people might vote or that some live people could cast more than one ballot.

In fact, the threat to the integrity of the 2006 elections was seen as so grave that Bradley Schlozman, the acting chief of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and later the U.S. attorney in Kansas City, twice wielded the power of the federal government to try to fix it.

Even the Republican-controlled Missouri General Assembly stepped into action.

Now, six months after freshman Missouri senator Jim Talent’s defeat handed Democrats control of the U.S. Senate, disclosures in the wake of the firings of eight U.S. attorneys show that GOP campaign to protect the balloting was not as it appeared.

In fact, no significant voter fraud was ever proven.

Instead, the Republican preoccupation with voter fraud was part of a wider effort to protect the GOP majority in Congress with a series of measures to dampen Democratic turnout. They included stiffer voter ID requirements, wholesale purges of names from lists of registered voters and tight policing of liberal get-out-the-vote drives.

The article goes on to detail the techniques used - really, the only good thing that can be said about this whole sordid business is that some of those techniques were so egregious that the courts threw them out before they could do all the harm they were designed to do.