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Fareed Zakaria:

Pity the U.S. presidential candidates. They had their positions on Iraq all worked out by last summer and have repeated them consistently ever since. But events on the ground have changed dramatically, and their rhetoric feels increasingly stale. They’re fighting the Iraq War all right, but it’s the wrong one.

The Democrats are having the hardest time with the new reality. Every candidate is committed to “ending the war” and bringing our troops back home. The trouble is, the war has largely ended, and precisely because our troops are in the middle of it.

Reality:

A suicide bomber blew himself up in front of a high school north of Baghdad on Tuesday, wounding 22 people including teachers and students arriving for the beginning of the school day…U.S. commanders credit anti-al-Qaida fighters from Sunni groups, a six-month cease-fire by a Shiite militia and the dispatch of 30,000 additional U.S. soldiers last year for the reduction in violence. But there has been an uptick in high-profile bombings in recent weeks, suggesting al-Qaida remains a potent threat.

* * *

On Monday, a suicide bomber apparently targeting a senior security official blew himself up inside a funeral tent, killing 18 people in Hajaj, a village about midway along the nearly 20 miles between Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit and the oil hub of Beiji, 155 miles north of Baghdad.

* * *

The attack comes one day after a 15-year-old suicide bomber walked into a party carrying a box of chocolates and detonated hidden explosives, killing himself, his cousin — a Sunni fighter working with U.S. and Iraqi forces — and four others.

* * *

Meanwhile, a military spokeswoman said a soldier killed over the weekend south of Baghdad was the first American casualty in a roadside bomb attack on the newly introduced, heavily armored MRAP, or Mine-Resistant, Ambush-Protected vehicle.

Not to mention:

At least 100 predominantly Sunni militiamen, known as Awakening Council members or Concerned Local Citizens, have been killed in the past month, mostly around Baghdad and the provincial capital of Baquba, urban areas with mixed Sunni and Shiite populations, according to Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani. At least six of the victims were senior Awakening leaders, Iraqi officials said.

Things are going great, if by “great” you mean “somewhat less horrifically terrible, but that could change.”

I expect conservatives will be denouncing this article as yet another example of America-hating liberal bias, yadda yadda yadda. What’s actually interesting is that the paper of record is tentatively beginning to acknowledge reality: people in this country, or at least some significant percentage thereof, understand what a colossal clusterfuck the Bush administration has been.

Now, Americans feel a loss of autonomy, in their own lives and in the nation. Their politics are driven by the powerlessness they feel to control their financial well-being, their safety, their environment, their health and the country’s borders. They question whether each generation will continue to ascend the economic ladder. That the political system seems so impotent only deepens their frustration and their insistence on results.

As she considers this campaign, Susan C. Powell, a 47-year-old training consultant who lives in a Kansas City suburb, said that what she feels is not so much hopelessness as doom.

“I know plenty of people who are doing worse than they were,” Ms. Powell said, “and nobody’s helping them out. People’s incomes are not keeping pace with inflation. People can’t afford their homes. People in their 30s and 40s, middle-income, and they don’t have jobs they can count on or access to health care. How can we say that we’re the greatest country on earth and essentially have the walking wounded?”

You almost have to feel sorry for the talk-radio apologists these days — it can’t be easy knowing you have to get up each day and find a way to put a happy face on corporate greed and political corruption and incompetence, when the consequences of same are painfully evident to people in their daily lives. Invocations of the long waits and bureaucracies of socialized medicine will eventually ring hollow to anyone who’s ever dealt with the long waits and bureaucracies of our own free market health system. Not to mention the people who can’t even find an affordable insurance plan, in this peculiar system of ours, in which availability of health care is inexplicably linked to employment status.

Then again, Republicans are often masterful at convincing people to vote against their own best interests, and Democrats are quite talented at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. As the line in “The Usual Suspects” goes, the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing people he didn’t exist.

But many assholes are certainly Republicans.

This is really quite extraordinary:

Opening his radio show with funeral music yesterday, Fox News host John Gibson callously mocked the death of actor Heath Ledger, calling him a “weirdo” with a “serious drug problem.”

Playing an audio clip of the iconic quote, “I wish I knew how to quit you” from Ledger’s gay romance movie Brokeback Mountain, Gibson disdainfully quipped, “Well, he found out how to quit you.” Laughing, Gibson then played another clip from Brokeback Mountain in which Ledger said, “We’re dead,” followed by his own, mocking “We’re dead” before playing the clip again.

When O’Reilly or Hannity say something outrageous, the response is always that they are commentators, not journalists, and thus held to a different standard of propriety. Gibson occupies some nether region, neither fish nor fowl. His tv show is structured like a newscast, but he hosts it like a commentator — and then proceeds to host an hour a day of unabashed hate talk radio. But even for the ill-defined niche he occupies, this is really beyond the pale.

This is basically what Fox News is: assholes broadcasting assholery to other assholes. It’s an asshole extravaganza!

… adding this here, because it seems related: just when you think Republicans can’t be any more appalling …

Signed prints are back, now available in 11×14 and 13×17 formats as well as 8.5×11. Details here, along with a small quantity of very rare posters, and a chance to get a custom illustration of yourself with Sparky the penguin.

If you’re the New York Times and you need a new columnist who’ll cover foreign policy, you obviously want William Kristol. After all, he’s the guy who said just before the war began, “we’ll be vindicated when we find the weapons of mass destruction and liberate the people of Iraq.”

Likewise, if you’re the Washington Post and need a long piece for last Sunday’s paper about the onrushing economic crunch, you obviously want Kevin Hassett. After all, he wrote Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting From the Coming Rise in the Stock Market.

I find the NY Times and Washington Post much more comprehensible if I just think of them as the church newsletters for a particularly unpleasant religion. OF COURSE the church elders choose writers who believe in transubstantiation.