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Here.

I wanted to go, but sometimes life does not work out perfectly. Maybe next year.

Spencer Ackerman has written an important and informative piece for the Washington Independent about how the Bush administration is attempting to lay the groundwork for a permanent U.S. occupation of Iraq before they leave office.

If you don’t know the background, here’s what’s been happening up to now:

U.S. troops currently operate in Iraq under a UN Security Council mandate. The mandate has been renewed annually since 2004. It gives coalition troops the legal authority to use force there.

A majority of the Iraqi parliament wants the US to leave Iraq, and for several years has been trying to prevent the mandate from being renewed unless it includes a specific timeframe for us to depart.

The executive branch of the Iraqi government (ie, Prime Minister Maliki and friends) wants the US to stay indefinitely. That’s because we want to stay, and Maliki is our puppet. Maliki therefore successfully got the UN to renew the mandate at the end of 2007, even though the Iraqi parliament opposed it and, under the Iraqi constitution, must approve all treaties. Maliki is exactly like Bush in this way; the legislative branch tries to assert its constitutional rights, and Maliki tells them: fuck you.

The mandate is now set to expire again at the end of this year. It would be near-impossible for Maliki and Bush to get another year’s extension, because the Iraqi parliament has now gotten its act together. And even if it could be extended, it’s undesirable from the administration’s perspective, because it doesn’t tie the hands of the next president.

Thus, Bush is attempting to create a bilateral “agreement” with Iraq via Maliki. It won’t be called a treaty, because as noted that would require the Iraqi parliament to approve it; even worse, under the US constitution, it would require the two-thirds approval of the US Senate.

So what the administration tried to do was quietly institute this accord between itself and Maliki (essentially between itself and itself), and write it so it was a treaty in all but name, giving the US the right to “protect” the Iraqi government from foreign and domestic threats.

However, Congress has actually been doing its job and pushing back on this—holding hearings, asking questions—and the administration has been somewhat stymied. That’s where Ackerman picks up the story.

GQ covers Meagan McCain:

Meghan has been given a prominent place in her father’s presidential campaign, most notably with her blog, McCainBlogette.com. Loosely inspired, she says—loosely!—by Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72, McCain Blogette is a sometimes irreverent, sometimes overly rah-rah account of life on the Straight Talk Express…

Meghan puts it [] succinctly: “I’m almost incapable of bullshit.”

It’s really fun to live in a country where the people at the very pinnacle of the establishment are rootin-tootin’ maverick insurgents. I’m guessing Meghan’s no-bullshit blog is particularly inspired by this part of Fear and Loathing:

This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it — that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.

Deleted, got what I need. Thanks for the help to everyone who responded!

Hillary Clinton has been taking some well-deserved flack for essentially doing the GOP’s dirty work for them, but I had underestimated the lengths she’d go to stop Barack Obama. Over at TPM, Josh Marshall has a remarkable behind-the-scenes view of Clinton’s attempt to drag the Rev. Wright affair back into the media spotlight :

Now obviously, Hillary’s been in the political big leagues for a while. She knows how to deflect a question. But it’s actually much richer than this. This afternoon Greg Sargent and I were talking this over and one of us realized that this wasn’t just any Pittsburgh paper. It was the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, the money-losing, vanity, fringe sheet of Richard Mellon Scaife, funder of the Arkansas Project, the American Spectator during its prime Clinton-hunting years and virtually every right-wing operation of note at one point or another over the last twenty years or more.

In fact, what I only discovered late this evening, when Eric Kleefeld sent me this link at National Review Online, is that not only was it Scaife’s paper. Scaife himself was there sitting just to Clinton’s right apparently taking part in the questioning.

For those who need a reminder of who Scaife is, here’s a bit from a CNN bio published during the Lewinsky scandal :

Scaife gave to GOPAC, the political fund that helped make Newt Gingrich speaker in 1994. Gingrich says Scaife’s money laid the basis for modern conservatism. And his money still flows:

* To the Heritage Foundation alone, nearly $3.5 million from Scaife foundations in the most recent three years on record.

* $1.22 million to the American Enterprise Institute.

* $1.40 million to Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

* $325,000 to the Cato Institute.

* $575,000 to the Citizens for a Sound Economy, among others.

Scaife has particular contempt for the Clintons. At a Heritage Foundation event in November 1994, Scaife said, “I think maybe Hillary and company have it figured out right. They wouldn’t be happy here.”

Scaife’s foundations shovel millions into groups hostile to Bill Clinton. The Free Congress Foundation, which runs a conservative cable channel, received $1.9 million from 1994 to 1996.

Hollywood’s Center for the Study of Public Culture, which sees liberal bias in the movies, got nearly $1.8 million. Accuracy in Media, a group still promoting the idea that Clinton aide Vince Foster may have been murdered, got $675,000.

At Scaife’s newspaper his reporter Christopher Ruddy doggedly pursues the Foster case. And when Ruddy’s book, “The Strange Death of Vincent Foster,” got a bad write-up in the American Spectator, saying Ruddy sounded like a “right-wing nut,” Scaife cut off the magazine’s money.

This is a man who literally spent millions trying to convince people that the Clintons are murderers, yet when Hillary got caught in a string of embarrassing lies that threaten to derail her presidential bid, she goes straight to heart of “the vast right wing conspiracy”.

I suppose if you’re in the business of character assassination, why not go to the best, right?