Author: Jonathan Schwarz

Is this an old story? Somehow I missed it before it showed up in the LA Times a few days ago:

In the run-up to the 2004 Democratic National Convention, when it was not yet clear who Bush’s opponent would be that November, Rove and his aides had begun to fear that their most dangerous foe would be then-Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina…

But instead of attacking Edwards, Rove’s team opened fire at Kerry.

Their thinking went like this, [Rove lieutenant Matthew] Dowd explained [after the election]: Democrats, in a knee-jerk reaction to GOP attacks, would rally around Kerry, whom Rove considered a comparatively weak opponent, and make him the party’s nominee. Thus Bush would be spared from confronting Edwards, the candidate Republican strategists actually feared most…

“Whomever we attacked was going to be emboldened in Democratic primary voters’ minds…So we started attacking John Kerry a lot in the end of January because we were very worried about John Edwards,” Dowd said. “And we knew that if we focused on John Kerry, Democratic primary voters would sort of coalesce” around Kerry.

“It wasn’t like we could tag [eliminate] somebody. Whomever we attacked was going to be helped,” he said.

I assume many people read that and immediately thought of this:

[T]he president says he was helped by bin Laden, who put out a videotaped diatribe against Bush the Friday before the 2004 election.

Bush said there were “enormous amounts of discussion” inside his campaign about the 15-minute tape, which he called “an interesting entry by our enemy” into the presidential race….

“I thought it was going to help,” he decided. “I thought it would help remind people that if bin Laden doesn’t want Bush to be the president, something must be right with Bush.”

Here’s an NPR story from February, 2003:

The Bush administration has been decidedly vague about how much a war with Iraq might cost. When pressed, officials have said less than $50 billion. Last year, White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey caused a stir when he put the price tag at between 100 and 200 billion at best. The administration dismissed the figure, and Lindsey was soon fired.

Here’s the 2004 WMD report by the CIA:

Advisory groups [Saddam] established generally assumed Saddam already had a preferred position [on issues] and commonly spent time trying to guess what it was and tailor their advice to it. More conscientious members of the Regime sought to work around sycophantic or timid superiors…

The growth of a culture of lying to superiors hurt policymaking…Lack of structural checks and balances allowed false information to affect Iraqi decision making with disastrous effects…

Saddam ignored his economic advisors in the Ministries of Finance and Planning with respect to strategic planning. For example, Saddam entered the Iran-Iraq war heedless of Ministry warnings about the economic consequences. He had no plan or strategy for how the war was to be financed.

From CNN:

The women are too afraid and ashamed to show their faces or have their real names used. They have been driven to sell their bodies to put food on the table for their children — for as little as $8 a day…

A mother of three, she wears light makeup, a gold pendant of Iraq around her neck, and an unexpected air of elegance about her.

“I don’t have money to take my kid to the doctor. I have to do anything that I can to preserve my child, because I am a mother,” she says, explaining why she prostitutes herself.

This isn’t the human degradation part, though. In fact, anyone who’d see these women as somehow shamed really should be punched in the face. Here’s the human degradation part, from Cunning Realist:

Wondering about those on the other side of this situation? Here’s something called the “International Sex Guide.” It features reports from men who have visited prostitutes in various countries. Yes, there’s an “Iraq” section. The most recent post, from today, links to the above report and asks “Can someone give us a trip report? thanks!”

Cunning Realist then cites some past posts about Iraq from this site, which are, horrifyingly enough, exactly what you’d expect.

But even that isn’t the deepest human degradation involved here. The deepest human degradation is that the State Department briefings from just before the war, using Iraqi women for our propaganda in the most vile way imaginable, are still online. And so’s this:

LAURA BUSH: I want the women of Iraq to know how much American women stand with them.

Rick Perlstein reports that he just got this email from David Horowitz:

One strong measurement of the effect we’re having (and the need for what we do) came in the form of request from the head the FBI-California Highway Patrol Joint Counter-terrorism Task Force who called this week to ask if their group could use our flash video “What Every American Needs to Know About Jihad” as a training film.

I hope you’ll take the time to watch this important video, here. It’s a great piece of work, although I’m concerned it may be a bit too intellectually and aesthetically sophisticated for the target audience.

I was going to write something about this alarming story by McClatchy reporter Matt Stearns about Bush’s continuing interest in attacking Iran. But Nell of A Lovely Promise already said everything I had to say:

Stearns vastly overstates Congressional opposition to a U.S. military strike in Iran. This passage made my jaw drop:

It’s been the consensus for months among the Democrats who hold the majority that Bush must get congressional authorization before any military strike [on Iran].

Orilly? Then why was a provision requiring such an authorization stripped from the Democratic leadership’s version of the Pentagon supplemental spending bill in April before ever coming to a vote? Why did a similar standalone bill go down to defeat in May with 100 Democratic members voting against it? And why does Stearns not even mention either event?

Read the rest.