The New York Times has confirmed the so-called “White House Memo” of January 31, 2003 is genuine. The memo, first reported several months ago, records a meeting at the White House between Blair, Bush and key advisors. Among the key points:

1. Bush had decided on war no matter what, even if UNMOVIC found nothing and they failed to get a second U.N. resolution.
2. Bush suggested creating a pretext for the war by painting a U.S. spy plane in the colors of the United Nations, in hopes Iraq would try to shoot it down.
3. Bush thought it was “unlikely there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups.”

So, how to deal with this embarrassing information? An unnamed “senior British official” tries this gambit:

“In all of this discussion during the run-up to the Iraq war, it is obvious that viewing a snapshot at a certain point in time gives only a partial view of the decision-making process.”

Huh, that sounds familiar. Where have I heard it before? Oh, right—it’s exactly what Tony Blair said about the Downing Street Memo:

“The trouble with having a political discussion on the basis of things that are leaked is that they are always taken right out of context. Everything else is omitted from the discussion and you end up focusing on a specific document.”

UK Defense Secretary John Reid also said this about the Downing Street Memo (via Nexis):

“You can produce one out of a thousand of memos that were flying about, which represented one person’s view about one particular issue.”

So now we have TWO British memos shamefully ripped out context. Or rather, eight memos ripped out of context, counting the six other documents related to the Downing Street Memo. Wait, I’m sorry—nine memos, when you add in the one Paul O’Neill revealed showing the Bush administration already planning for “Post-Saddam Iraq” on January 31, 2001. Or actually, ten memos, counting the NSA memo about spying on the U.N. Well, to be fair—eleven memos, given the one Blair aide John Sawer wrote in May, 2003 about the lack of post-war planning.

Okay: we have eleven internal memos ripped horribly out of context. And in a bizarre coincidence, they tell exactly the same story as a gigantic amount of public information.

But that’s irrelevant. What’s important is we know if we had access to all the relevant government documents, they would tell a completely different story. If only Tony Blair and George Bush had the authority to declassify them!

Sadly, of course, this is impossible. Blair and Bush are completely powerless in this matter. All they can do is tell us how they would be completely vindicated if only we knew things we aren’t allowed to know.

Greg and Mr. Tomorrow have produced pictures of George Bush looking quite peculiar.

Nevertheless, I believe my Bush photograph below trumps them all.

Still, I’m not displaying this to denigrate Bush; just the opposite. As I said some time ago on my own site:

I don’t like the “look at this picture of [someone I disagree with] looking stupid!” school of commentary. If you take enough pictures of any person, they will look stupid in a least a few of them. Thus, all you’re proving when you do this is that the person you disagree with is a person. What an achievement.

So that’s not what I’m getting at with this picture. On the contrary: it reminds me of George Bush’s berserk humanity. Nothing, not even the power of the presidency, can protect human beings from the silliness within us all.

ALSO: When you saw this picture, did you try to make this face yourself? Be honest.

Reading Tom’s earlier post about Bush’s weird face reminded me of these photos from Oct. 2004 :

Although the links to the source are long dead, I can assure you that those aren’t photos of a wax dummy. Aside from the unflattering sweat, the President looked bloated and unhealthy. At the time these photos accompanied news about skipped physical exams and the mysterious hump on Bush’s back. Looking back, I don’t remember ever getting answers to the rather obvious question : Did/does the President have some sort of illness he isn’t telling us about?

ALBANY - A Republican challenger to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is bizarrely claiming that the former first lady has been spying in her bedroom window and flying helicopters over her house in the Hamptons, witnesses told The Post yesterday.

Former Reagan-era Pentagon official Kathleen “KT” McFarland stunned a crowd of Suffolk County Republicans on Thursday by saying:

“Hillary Clinton is really worried about me, and is so worried, in fact, that she had helicopters flying over my house in Southampton today taking pictures,” according to a prominent GOP activist who was at the event.

“She wasn’t joking, she was very, very serious, and she also claimed that Clinton’s people were taking pictures across the street from her house in Manhattan, taking pictures from an apartment across the street from her bedroom,” added the eyewitness, who is not involved in the Senate race.

Not sure exactly what to make of that, but the source is the normally GOP-friendly New York Post. (Via Daily Kos).

This photo caught my eye on Yahoo News. It looks like some strange Photoshop chop job, but it’s not. Maybe he’s actually an evil alien puppetmaster who didn’t quite get his skin costume on properly that morning. Or maybe he’s collapsing inward on himself and soon there will be nothing left but a dense gravitational field from which no truth can escape.

Oh, wait.

Awww…poor Ben/Augustine. He’s decided to step down to spend more time with his family. For those who want to know why Ben’s plagiarism is everyone’s fault but his, make sure to check out RedState. The pity-party is full effect, with Ben whining :

But in the course of accusing me of racism, homophobia, bigotry, and even (on one extensive Atrios thread) of having a sexual relationship with my mother, the leftists shifted their accusations to ones of plagiarism. You can find the major examples here: I link to this source only because I believe it’s the only place that hasn’t yet written about how they’d like to rape my sister.

I know that charges of plagiarism are serious. While I am not a journalist, I have, myself, written more than one thing that has been plagiarized in the past.

Don’t you understand? Ben’s the victim here. If he can’t convince you, take a look at some of the other diaries on the site’s homepage for various calls to arms, posted under titles dripping with self-righteousness like “This is About Decency”, “We Must Defend”, “We Must Continue”, and my favorite “We Must Attack” which begins with this hilarious bit of faux-intellectualism :

It was Hannah Arendt who introduced us to the banality of evil. There was more to this thing called “evil” than grainy newsreel footage of delirious chanting of “Sieg Heil” or the “Internationale.” Rage and hatred were not the first steps toward convincing seemingly normal people to go along with totalitarianism. First, repression had to seem normal. Domestic enemies were not hated – they were dehumanized. In the eyes of their countrymen, their souls were emptied of any qualities extraneous to Political Man. They were the imperialist/capitalist running dog/Jew/Trotskyite – and that was all.

In 2006 in America, we see perfect replicas of Stalin’s drones at work in response to about the only decent thing said about the Domenech affair on Daily Kos. It is an exquisite performance right out of the two minutes hate.

The left is all bent out of shape about Ben’s plagiarism. You know who else hated plagiarism?? Hitler!

Of course, it would be unfair to blame Ben for something written by others (no, Ben only takes credit for the good stuff other people write), so let me highlight the last line in his oh-so-classy resignation letter :

To my enemies: I take enormous solace in the fact that you spent this week bashing me, instead of America.

Such a humble statement from a guy who started this little disaster with the line “This is a blog for the majority of Americans.” The most pathetic part of this whole experiment gone wrong is that his “To my enemies” postscript is the closest this self-described spokesman for “the majority of Americans” gets to taking responsibility for his own actions.

Get over yourself, Ben. You screwed up. A lot. Real men don’t throw temper tantrums when they’re caught cheating.

All the cool kids are doing it.

Speaking of: while I’m out on tour next week, I’m mostly handing the site over to Greg (and Bob and Jon and Jeanne, if they want it). I may pop up occasionally with a tour update or a wry observation on the difficulties of airplane travel, but don’t expect too much more. And it goes without saying I’m not going to have much time for email.

Conason has a rundown on the whole Domenech mess that Greg mentioned a few posts down, for those of you who haven’t been paying close attention. And since this blog is now one of the select portals through which you can bypass the Salon ads, you can Read the Whole Thing.

I suspect that young Ben’s remaining time at the Post can be measured in hours. I’ll be extraordinarily surprised if he survives the day. Of course, the Post has shown itself to have quite the tin ear on these matters in the past, so maybe I’m wrong.

… via Atrios, here’s a classic example of the right’s refusal to ever acknowledge inconvenient facts — in this case, young Ben’s irrefutable acts of plagiarism:

And now those opposed to Ben have googled prior writings that on the surface appear suspicious, but only because permissions obtained and judgments made offline were not reflected online by an out dated and out of business campus newspaper. But that’s all the opponents want - just enough to sabotage a career, though in the process they will sabotage themselves. Facts have no meaning. Only impressions have any bearing on this. The charges of plagarism are false, meant to bring down a good and honest man. The presented facts to prove plagarism are specious — products of shoddy work. One could easily think the producers of 60 Minutes II were behind them.

Facts have never been debate winners among the haters…

That last line especially speaks for itself, though not in ways the author intended.

…more: Digby nails it:

Of course poeple don’t have to read him. But we do have to consider the obvious fact that Kurtz and the Washington Post believe that this blatantly partisan Republican blogger “balances” an allegedly “left leaning” White House critic. That they still don’t understand the difference between the conventions of overt partisan media and mainstream online criticism like Dan Froomkin’s column is painfully clear. That this particular blogger has been exposed virtually overnight as a racist and plagiarist proves that they had no idea how the right wing media works. Still.

(snip)

They are like sheltered children. They do not know when they are being played. Indeed, they don’t even seem to know the game exists.

* * *

… and the boy resigns. His whining non-apology about the Very Mean Leftists is here. (Anyone really believe he got an email suggesting his mother should have aborted him? Does that sound like something an actual liberal would say–or what a shallow young conservative writer would imagine a liberal saying?)

Note the insistence that he didn’t really plagiarize anyone. Then go over to Atrios’s place and scroll down through examples of plagiarism too numerous to list, and decide for yourself.

We’ve seen this over and over again, from conservatives over the past few years, this apparent belief that saying a thing is all that is necessary to make it true. If only it were so. As the saying goes, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

Here’s a good example of the immoral healthcare system that conservatives are trying to protect :

Authorities released a videotape this afternoon of what they say is the dumping of a 63-year-old woman on the streets of skid row.

The videotape, recorded by security cameras outside the Union Rescue Mission entrance on San Pedro Street on Monday afternoon, shows a taxicab pulling a U-turn and then driving out of view. A few seconds later, a woman wearing a hospital gown and no shoes walks from the same direction, wandering in the street and on the sidewalk for about three minutes before a Union Rescue Mission staff person escorts her inside the mission.

LAPD Capt. Andrew Smith said he believes the taxi took the woman, a 63-year-old Gardena resident, downtown against her will after she was discharged from Kaiser Permanente Bellflower on Monday.

You’d think examples like this would prompt the American public to say to themselves “Hmmmm….I wonder why this doesn’t happen in other countries?”, but the very concept of providing healthcare to everyone is pilloried as a step towards despotism (unlike, say, the disposal of the fourth, fifth, and sixth amendments). Here’s how Tom Neely and I sent-up the GOP talking point a couple of years ago :



If the Democrats knew what was good for them (ha!), they’d collect stories like this as evidence that the United States is long overdue for a universal single-payer healthcare system. Sometimes showing a willingness to go down in flames on principle prevents that very thing from happening.

I haven’t written anything about The Washington Post’s hiring of Ben Domenech because I support their first amendment right to piss away their credibility by hiring an asshole, but the dirt people have been digging up on the self-described spokesman for “the majority of Americans” has really shocked me. No, not Ben’s double-life as “Augustine” or his overt racism. The thing that I find amazing is that Ben Domenech is so ethically challenged that he plagiarized movie reviews. Movie reviews! These weren’t assignments that required research, interviews, or even a basic degree of accurracy. All he had to do was sit through a movie and write a couple hundred words about what he thought, but he couldn’t even do that without stealing.