THIS MODERN WORLD

Was it a defibrillator?

Via Atrios, I see the weapons hunters have folded up shop:

Four months after Charles A. Duelfer, who led the weapons hunt in 2004, submitted an interim report to Congress that contradicted nearly every prewar assertion about Iraq made by top Bush administration officials, a senior intelligence official said the findings will stand as the ISG’s final conclusions and will be published this spring.

I suppose those of us who were correct to doubt the administration’s claims can now humbly await the profuse apologies and mea culpas of the thoroughly-discredited warmongers.

Conservative radio talkers and other simplistic thinkers have been contrasting Michael Moore and Mel Gibson for the past year, as respresentative of the alleged divide between blue and red states.

Oh well:

When Mr. Gibson walked to the press room lectern, he and Mr. Moore seemed delighted to meet each other.

“I feel a strange kinship with Michael,” Mr. Gibson said. “They’re trying to pit us against each other in the press, but it’s a hologram. They really have got nothing to do with one another. It’s just some kind of device, some left-right. He makes some salient points. There was some very expert, elliptical editing going on. However, what the hell are we doing in Iraq? No one can explain to me in a reasonable manner that I can accept why we’re there, why we went there, and why we’re still there.”

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Tonight:

Because even leaving the hotel to pursue a story is so dangerous, Hughes says that now the safest way to get a good story is to be embedded with U.S. troops. “Generally, all it takes is one email to some lieutenant,” he says. “A few days later, you’re in a sardine can bumping along Highway 1.”

Hughes joins John Burns of The New York Times, photographer Jason Howe and Reuters photographer Alastair MacDonald — all on an embed in an area called “the triangle of death.” They first receive an hour-long military Power Point presentation. “You have to remember you are only getting one side of the story, and it’s a very convincing narrative,” MacDonald says.

Hughes then meets up with Jackie Spinner, a reporter from The Washington Post, who is hunkered down beside a concrete wall, trying to file a story by satellite. She laments her dependence upon Iraqi stringers and the military for information. “I can’t be my own eyes and ears anywhere,” she says.