Why does she choose to end her story with that particular anecdote?

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Here's a snippet of a column (offline) by Jeannette Walls from the October 1996 Esquire that tells the amusing tale:

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How revealing is that?

According to this UPI story from Wednesday, "USAF playing cat and mouse game over Iran", the coming war with Iran that Hersh describes may in fact have already begun, in much the same way the Iraq war was up and running well before "Shock 'n Awe" of March 2003:

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Now on one level this is obviously unsurprising. Bush was on O'Reilly before the debates, Cheney has been on Limbaugh within the past few months, and, as we all know, these guys need compliant media running dogs like Fox/Sinclair/Drudge to survive.

But this does strike me as actually somewhat important, and suggestive of the state of the race at the moment, and can maybe point us to a sense of what the Bush/Cheney endgame is going to be.

If they have to go on Hannity, the most rabid and dependable of the rightwing media mouthbreathers, just two weeks before the election, that tells me that BC04 has given up on the swing voters and is now betting the whole game on squeezing out every last vote from the troglodyte base. At this point, you'd have thought the Hannity-watching base should be all sewn up and taken for granted, and they should be looking to land those precious few independents still out there. Since Hannity's audience will clearly give them no new moderate voters, it seems to suggest that the intent is to rev up the base, and only the base, from here on out.

Perhaps I'm overly optimistic, but I think this tells us things aren't going that well for BC04. All they have left is the base and a prayer (they've got lots of those). And I'm betting that Rove is betting wrong on this. I think our fired-up base, and the persuadable middle, kicks their base's wingnut ass.

Or, to put it in geek-speak, all their base are belong to us.

This is how Bush described the "hard work" he does for America in the debate on Thursday night:

When Bush uttered this brain-bendingly ridiculous and appalling statement, which seems to equate the Presidency with watching television, it rang a bell. That locution, "I see on the tv screens," sounded very familiar, so I did a little googling. Confirming my suspicions, as you can see below, I discovered it's one of Bush's absolute favorite rhetorical devices, appearing in speech after speech, in widely different contexts, going all the way back to 2000 and the Bush-Gore debates (no doubt it goes back even further, but I'll let someone else do the Nexis search).

While the obsessive recurrence of this verbal formula raises the intriguing possibility that his handlers purposefully include it in Bush's speeches, supposing that it adds to his "regular guy" image and helps the average "American Idol" viewer see him as one of them, it also resoundingly confirms one of the major negative media narratives now emerging about Bush in the wake of the debate: He's out of touch and living in a "fantasy world."

Bush, as the following litany makes clear, engages reality only as it is filtered through a "tv screen." We already know that he doesn't read any newspapers and that he relies entirely upon his staff to give him "objective information," but we can now see even more clearly that Bush's very notion of reality itself--especially horrifying, bloody, unpleasant reality--is an entirely mediated one. He's like the characters in DeLillo's "White Noise," for whom the actuality of a traumatic experience depends upon its appearance on the tv news (even if it's their own experience). An event does not exist for him unless it shows up on the tv. And it's only when it does show up on tv that he feels obliged to comment upon it, whereupon he usually asserts explicitly that it is simply the fact that he watched it on tv that in itself demonstrates his profound and humane understanding of others' pain or "hard work." Bill Clinton "felt" your pain. George Bush watches your pain on his home entertainment center.

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Milbank, who has been the frequent target of White House abuse and ostracization for actually daring to occasionally question the shiny, happy media narrative the White House imposes on most of the rest of the press corps, takes his revenge today in a tasty little piece called "Reaction Shots May Tell Tale of Debate: Bush's Scowls Compared to Gore's Sighs".

What's good about the piece, apart from the fact that it cements the story as one that will last into (and, with luck, beyond) the weekend gabfests, is the way it points the rest of the press to connect Bush's debate behavior with the crappy way he's treated the press themselves during his imperious reign. He quietly but powerfully points out that the petulant Bush that 60 million Americans saw for the first time on Thursday night is the same obnoxious Bush that the press has had to deal with for 3 and a half years--rude, dismissive, and contemptuous of those who would dare to question him...

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I'm not sure it's really even worth critiquing as a piece of argumentation, but it sure does reward the connoisseur of spectacles of public derangement. He's so unhinged about Moore's cultural, ideological, and economic success, it's like watching an enraged circus clown immolate himself in the town square.

Hackworth, who helped break the prisoner abuse story and has some very interesting sources in the military, isn't buying today's Defense Dept. spin that Abu Ghraib was a local aberration without any direction from the Pentagon, and says this thing is going to get bigger and worse.

Among other things, he points out that Taguba's report is specifically limited to an investigation of the Military Police and doesn't explore the role of the intelligence services (he calls this an "old dodge" on the part of the Army).

More interestingly, though, he claims to have inside sources who say that the prisoner abuse was not only widely known in the Pentagon, but that it was "organized and planned" by the top brass, even including the making of training films at Abu Ghraib that were sent back for use at the intelligence school. If that's true, and we find those training films, this thing could really go thermonuclear.

Here's the transcript...

First, here's Condoleeza Rice testifying yesterday, explaining the Administration's lack of action in preventing 9/11, as quoted in the New York Times:

"The restructuring of the F.B.I. was not going to be done in the 233 days in which we were in office," she said. Nor, she said, was the country about to make its aircraft cockpits more secure, or threaten to invade Afghanistan, or conduct any other kind of preemptive military strike in the name of counterterrorism.

Now (as TPM has noted) here are Dana Milbank and Robin Wright in tomorrow's Washington Post, discussing Bush's penchant for vacations:

This is Bush's 33rd visit to his ranch since becoming president. He has spent all or part of 233 days on his Texas ranch since taking office, according to a tally by CBS News. Adding his 78 visits to Camp David and his five visits to Kennebunkport, Maine, Bush has spent all or part of 500 days in office at one of his three retreats, or more than 40 percent of his presidency.

Hmm. Notice any similarities? D'ya think that the Post just happened to slip that little "233" number in by chance? Now that's what I call a high quality smack right in Bush's petulant, lazy, responsibility-dodging face. Bravo Milbank and Wright!

Perhaps Frist might care to check out this Washington Post article from a year ago, "Anti-Terror Pioneer Turns In the Badge: After 11 Years, Clarke Leaves Legacy of Lasting Change -- and Enemies", by Barton Gellman on the occasion of Clarke's retirement on the eve of the Iraq War. The whole article (excerpted below) is very interesting in its portrait of Clarke as an intense, somewhat solitary character who rubbed lots of people the wrong way. But this is the important bit, down towards the end:

Among friends, Clarke is skeptical that the coming war with Iraq is integral to the war on terrorism, as the White House maintains. He describes it as a diversion of scarce resources and a wedge between Washington and critical allies in destroying al Qaeda. Until late last year, he has said, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein would not have been among the top suspects should al Qaeda manage to acquire a weapon of mass destruction. Now, with Hussein's regime on the brink of falling, he will.

Seems pretty consistent to me.

"Had I known that the enemy was going to use airplanes to strike America, to attack us, I would have used every resource, every asset, every power of this government to protect the American people."

This is what he said on Tuesday, as noted by TPM: "Had my administration had any information that terrorists were going to attack New York City on Sept. 11, we would have acted."

I'm pretty sure I've heard Rice and Rumsfeld and McClellan say almost identical things (any additional citations welcome). They stick to this incredibly strict verbal formula about not knowing either that airplanes could be used as missiles or that New York would be attacked, or something similiar. They don't say: "If we had known that there was a serious threat of attack, we would have acted." They always qualify their absence of knowledge with some very specific detail.

So the question is, what does the absurd specificity of the White House language on this mean? We know they're all serial obfuscators and liars, but we've also all become very schooled in spotting the kinds of rhetorical evasions, legalisms, unvarying talking points, and non-denial denials which are these guys' stock in trade. So what, exactly, is the issue here? What dangerous truth is this linguistic sleight-of-hand intended to obscure? Can we deduce, based on what folks like Clarke are saying, and based on what the White House is pointedly not saying, precisely what it is they are hiding or afraid to admit publicly? And isn't it about time somebody in the press asked BushCo why they insist on using this particular rhetorical formula?

I almost don't care if it's true. On this historic day, it just makes me happy to think that it's even possible that every pillar of the Bush regime is crumbling. Happy, happy thoughts.

Georgia is one of the numerous states where the conservatives are trying to do on a local level what Bush wants to do nationally: change the state constitution to enshrine anti-gay discrimination. And check out what Haines posted on his blog this afternoon:

ACTION ALERT!!!

The bill to ban gay marriage in the Georgia Constitution may be going to a floor vote in the Georgia House today. Contact your elected representative and tell him or her to vote AGAINST this bill.

If you don't know who your elected representative is, find out at this site:

http://www.sos.state.ga.us/cgi-bin/locator.asp

This bill is an unprecedented attempt by the conservatives to attack the rights of the citizens of this state. It's shameful for them to be going to such great lengths to deny our gay neighbors the same rights that other healthy families enjoy throughout our community.

This issue is about equal rights. But it is also about having a constitution that does not embody hate and discrimination. Tell your representative that our constutiion exists to guarantee rights, and not take them away.
--Doug Haines

Be it noted that a) this is one of the most conservative states in the nation and Haines is still taking this stand (though, granted, his Athens power base is more liberal than most of GA), and b) Haines's Democratic rival (and fellow blog-advertiser) John Barrow says nothing about this issue on his website, but does have code-word stuff about "protecting our rural heritage."

UK spies 'bugged UN's Kofi Annan'

British spies were bugging UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's office in the run up to the Iraq war, former UK cabinet minister Clare Short has claimed.

The ex-international development secretary said she had read some of the transcripts of his conversations.

Ms Short said she recalled thinking, as she talked to Mr Annan: "Oh dear, there will be a transcript of this and people will see what he and I are saying."

Tony Blair is likely to be quizzed about this during his monthly briefing.

The prime minister is also set to face questions on the dramatic collapse of the trial of GCHQ whistle blower Katharine Gun.

She had been accused of leaking a secret e-mail from US spies allegedly requesting British help in bugging UN delegates head of the Iraq invasion.

I'd heard something about this spying story a couple of weeks back, with the suggestion that British Intelligence was spying on behalf of the US, which seems a fairly logical supposition. We'll see if this story goes anywhere this time.

Was just watching Judy Woodruff interview Rep. Norm Dicks (D-WA), a Kerry supporter, about Kerry being "weak on defense," and citing the RNC talking points on how Kerry "voted against 16 different weapons systems."

Woodruff runs down the list of weapons systems in her most snide tone, saying "the list goes on and on...." Dicks, very calmly, takes her head off by pointing out that all those weapons systems were included in a single defense appropriations bill against which Kerry had voted, not 16 different votes which is what the RNC (and Woodruff) are trying to suggest. Woodruff, sensing humiliation, tries to cut him off with a raised voice, asking incredulously, "Are you trying to claim that all these weapons systems were part of a single appropriations vote?" Dicks replies, again, "Yes, that's what I'm telling you." Judy, in obvious panic, quickly changes the subject, but Dicks' (sadly) unspoken accusation lingers over the broadcast like a foul odor: "Are you a real journalist or do you just read off the RNC blastfaxes?" Alas, we all know--even Judy, now--the answer to that question.