If you’ve come here looking for the article Karl Rove in the Corner, you’ll find the link to a PDF in this post at the very end. Read the comments while you’re there!

We know the tide has turned when perennial bush apologist Howard Fineman says his man is appearing desperate and hopeless, caught between Iraq and a hard place.

George Bush’s real political enemy now isn’t so much John Kerry as it is the flow of the news. Not long ago, Kerry’s decision to attack the president as commander-in-chief (remember all those Swift Boat vets in Boston?) was dismissed by analysts (including me) as naïve at best, folly at worst. Well, it may turn out to have been the move that wins this race.

Presidential campaigns take on a life and shape of their own in the last stretch and this one now has. It’s the president desperately trying to tear down Kerry as the news tears down the president. Good things are happening in the war on terrorism — the voting in Afghanistan, for example — but they are all but unnoticed in the rising flood of stories from and about Iraq.

As things now stand, Bush is left with only one argument and justification for having launched a war that has cost 1,000 lives, $150 billion and whatever goodwill America had won in the aftermath of 9/11. His last-resort reason: Saddam Hussein might have developed weapons that he might have given to terrorists that might attack the United States. And even that reasoning is undermined by the new report of the Iraq Survey Group, which says that Saddam’s capacities, whatever they might have been, were withering, not “gathering,” under the weight of inspections.

So no we all know: the war was a hoax, and we were all hoodwinked, myself included. And not even shrub’s most forgiving critics can ignore that sad fact. When you screw up so colossally, so grotesquely, so completely, you are rarely given a second chance. It is becoming increasingly impossible for Americans to consider rewarding bush for his ineptitude and stupidity with yet another four years to lay waste to the country, and to the world.

Fineman doesn’t see a way out, not when the news about bush’s needless war is so horrifying. Simply by being on the other side of the political fence gives Kerry the upper hand.

The second and third presidential debates will shift the focus — the second, part way to domestic matters; the third, all the way. Bush’s aim will be to paint Kerry as an unpalatable liberal who accumulated nothing but bad Big Government ideas during his 19 years in the Senate. Kerry will answer, essentially, “I’m a Democrat.” In normal times that would not be a good enough answer, but if the tide of dissatisfaction with Bush as commander-in-chief rises high enough, being a Democrat — in other words not George Bush — may be good enough.

I don’t see that tide lowering any time soon, and it may well buoy Kerry to victory. And then we can truthfully proclaim, “Mission Accomplished.”

Funny.

Although this one from the South China Morning Post offers some interesting information on the specific words the infamous Chinese Net fiulters are poised to capture. And some of the ruses savvy Chinese surfers have adopted to outsmart the Cybernanny are downright hilarious.

Last month, a group of hackers uncovered a file buried within the operating instructions of QQ 2003. The file contains a list of words likely to rile government officials.

About 20 per cent deal with sexual jargon too rude to print in a family newspaper. For Chinese-language students looking to expand their vocabulary of naughty words, this .dll file is a good place to start. (Users of QQ 2003 should search for a document called COMtoolkit.dll. Newer versions of QQ’s program lack the file).

The remainder of the list deals with politically touchy subjects. In the file, not surprisingly, are topics such as Falun Gong, the Tiananmen Square massacre and the independence movements in Taiwan, Xinjiang and Tibet.

But the file also hints at concerns about the Web being used to spread ultra-nationalism, with references to the Sino-Russian border and territorial dispute over the Diaoyu Islands.

Many of the words are general, such as “truth” and “idea”, suggesting philosophical discussion is off-limits. Other words include references to official corruption and the cases of political prisoners.

Why some phrases appear on the list – “in October”, “spring in Beijing”, “toad” and “North Korea” – are a complete mystery.

What is also not clear is how the .dll file works. It does not appear to block words from instant messages, suggesting its purpose is to alert officials to the discussion of sensitive topics.

Mainland internet users are aware of what critics have dubbed The Great Firewall of China, leading to the creation of new spellings for names and terms to bypass the censors.

The artfully insulting homonyms include spelling former premier Zhu Rongji’s name so that it reads deaf and deformed pig. Chairman Jiang becomes soy sauce marinated pig daughter-in-law, while Mao Zedong’s moniker is transformed into a vivid description of a toilet.

No one ever accused the Chinese of lack of creativity. I salute their efforts to confound the censors and suspect that no matter how hard the CCP tries to silence the spread of ideas, the Internet will ultimately prove to be key to their steady erosion of power — and ultimately, to their extinction.

Or so contends former Republican attack dog who’s seen the light Andrew Sullivan. Just scroll down and see all the reasons he says Cheney got pulverized. While Cheney’s performance no doubt delighted his base, it was, Sullivan maintains, a dramatic defeat in terms of reaching swing voters. Also, a commenter here has compiled a list of all the flash polls, which show either that Edwards blew Cheney out of the water or that the Dems were much better at getting their people to participate (probably a little of both). You’ll also find a good chronicle of Cheney’s lies here.

I feel under the weather and probably won’t post again tonight. But it’s wonderful to watch the tables as they continue to turn on our miserable little president. In the wake of all the good reviews Edwards was winning, it was hardly surprising to see shrub announce a “major policy address” today in Pennsylvania. Too bad it was just a regurgitation of his stump speech and tired attacks on kerry. This was a despicable trick, and unfortunately the media fell for it.

[Photos via the mighty Poor Man.)

Just like last week, there’s a buzz going around that the Republicans will win the debate tonight. That’s always a good thing, as it lowers the bar a bit for our man, John Edwards, though I think he’ll do well no matter where the bar is set. But I won’t assue anything; it’ll be a mean, tough debate.

I watched a rerun this weekend of Cheney’s 2000 debate with Joe Lieberman and was reminded that Cheney is a damn good debater. I think a lot of Dems have misunderestimated him as an angry, hot-headed curmudgeon. He’s not. He’s shrewd, calculating and well spoken. He came off brilliantly, and he kicked Lieberman’s ass (Lieberman was polite and gentle to the point of being lovey-dovey).

But events of the past couple of days have perhaps stacked the odds in Edwards’ favor, at least from my perpective. Foreign policy is seen as his weakest length, and that’s where Cheney was going to beat him. BUt over the past 24 hours we’ve had 1.) Rumsfeld’s famous statement that there’s no hard evidence of a significant relationship between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein (followed by a huge flip-flop, of course), and 2.) Paul Bremer’s amazing admission that he was appalled at Baghdad’s lawlessness when he arrived, and that he begged for more troops to be sent. (White House response to these charges: [chirp].)

These two statements give Edwards tremendous ammunition when Cheney tries to tie Iraq to the war on terror (the cornerstone justifying the war), and when he defends America’s waging of the Iraq war. A godsend. Now Edwards can point to the government itself, the leaders of the Defense Department and the Iraqi occupation — their own words blow them out of the water.

The sense in America right now is that this will be the most important vice presidential debate ever. Right now I’m cautiously optimistic that the good guys will win. Cheney must be on the verge of hysteria now that he’s had to rewrite all his talking points at the last minute — twice!

UPDATE: Too tired to blog about it, but I can safely say it was a draw in terms of style and substance, with a slight edge to Edwards, especially on jobs and the domestic economy. But that represents a major victory for Edwards, as this was the test to see whether he could stand up against “the experienced guy” — and he did that, and one better. So while the bush people didn’t lose points for this — indeed, it’s a big help to them after the fiasco of bush’s performance last Thursday — the Kerry team came out way ahead. Special thanks to Bremer and Rumsfeld for all their help!

Remember all the talk about SARS being a catalyst for cleaning up the markets in Guandong province, where animals and people are crowded together in ways that would give a US health inspector a major coronary? Seems the concern has died down, and conditions are back to normal (i.e., filthy and unsafe).

In southern China, it doesn’t matter if an animal is an endangered species. As long as it walks, wriggles or jumps, it’s good enough for the pot. To prove the point, visit a wild animal market in the thriving city of Guangzhou.

“You want to buy a porcupine?” a worker asked as he looked up from a half-disemboweled civet cat, which some scientists say is the source of the deadly SARS virus that wreaked havoc around the world last year, killing more than 800 people.

Squatting just next to him, a few workers scrub the white carcass of a freshly plucked porcupine, a protected species under the U.N. Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, or CITES.

Nearby, half a dozen other people sit around mounds of water snakes, peeling their skin off and revealing a pink stretch of flesh. Water snake meat is relatively cheap and popular but conservationists have warned the trade is endangering the reptile, once abundant in the wild.

In this dark, foul-smelling market in Guangzhou, traders have just about anything to offer from birds and waterfowl, domestic dogs and cats, to the exotic flying squirrels and leopard cats.

The funny/sad article makes it clear that the sellers are fully aware that they are selling rare species into extinction, and that they’re breaking the law. And it doesn’t matter a bit. No thought to the future and the world others will inherit. And we wonder why there’s an environemntal crisis in China.

Now this is an interesting item from my local paper. Only a few days ago Marshall Wittmann was John McCain’s director of communications. Today, Wittmann said he is endorsing the Kerry-Edwards ticket and accused the bush-cheney team of waging “an unprecedentedly cynical and divisive campaign.”

“I am an independent McCainiac who hopes to revive the Bull Moose tradition of Theodore Roosevelt, and I support the Kerry-Edwards agenda,” Wittmann writes.

“This unreconstructed Bull Moose will run with the donkey in November.”

Wittmann had been McCain’s director of communications for the past two years. He left Wednesday to become a senior fellow at the DLC, a centrist or right-of-center Democratic group….

Wittmann said the point he is making is that the Bush administration has “betrayed” efforts to create a new politics of national greatness and unity in the aftermath of 9/11 through its divisive tax policies and the war in Iraq.

Bush did not invent our enemies, Wittmann writes. “But, despite all his bravado and swagger, he has made it more difficult to build a domestic and international political coalition to ultimately prevail against our terrorist adversaries. He has bred distrust by driving a cynical partisan agenda that seeks to reward the wealthy, while branding his political adversaries as vaguely unpatriotic.”

”….But there is no remaining shred of doubt that another four years of a Bush presidency would have a toxic effect on American politics. If George W. Bush is re-elected, unlimited corporate power, cynicism and division will ride high in the saddle.”

Wow. Of course, McCain’s saying this doesn’t reflect his own viewpoint, blah blah blah. But I’d bet my soul that it really does. Tragic, that politics won’t allow him to say so himself.

Digby has written one of his best posts yet on what I see as the oddest phenomenon in American political history, i.e., the fact that the george bush many Americans believe they know has literally no relation to the man bush really is.

The piece is inspired by this ghoulish image that seems to have instantaneously become ubiquitous throughout the blogosphere.

This image is disconcerting and it evokes strong reactions because it symbolizes the cognitive dissonance so many of us have been living with for the last four years as we’ve watched the man who lost the election but won the office drive us to distraction with the contradictions of his character. And nothing has been more frustrating than the fact that so many in the media and in the public at large seemed to see something entirely different than we did.

I believe that this happened because after 9/11, the media cast Bush in the role of strong, resolute leader, perhaps because the nation needed him to be that, at least for a little while. And the people gratefully laid that mantle on him and he took it because the office demanded no less. The narrative of the nation at war required a warrior leader and George W. Bush was all we had. Karl Rove and others understood that they could use this veil to soothe the American people and flatter the president to take actions that no prudent, thoughtful leader would have taken after our initial successes in Afghanistan. This “man with the bullhorn” image of Bush crystallized in the minds of many Americans and has not been revisited until now.

Digby walks us step by step through the glaring contradictions between our president’s persona and his reality, and also how he has managed to keep the mask glued to his face for so long. And, most importantly, on how last Thursday that mask finally dropped, to the horror of bush’s handlers, and to anyone else who was watching objectively.

There is no doubt that whether it’s a cowboy hat or a crotch hugging flightsuit, George W. Bush enjoys wearing the mantle of American archetypal warriors. But when he goes behind the curtain and sheds the costume, a flinty, thin-skinned, immature man who has never taken responsibility for his mistakes emerges. The strong compassionate leader is revealed as a flimsy paper tiger.

On Thursday night, the president forgot himself. After years of being protected from anyone who doesn’t flatter and cajole, he let his mask slip when confronted with someone who didn’t fear his childish retribution or need anything from him. Many members of the public got a good sharp look at him for the first time in two years and they were stunned. Like that black and white image, the dichotomy of the real Bush vs. the phony Bush is profoundly discomfiting.

Luckily for America and the world, a fully synthesized, mature man stood on the other side of that stage ready to assume the mantle of leadership, not as a theatrical costume but as an adult responsibility for which he is prepared by a lifetime of service, study and dedication. I would imagine that many voters felt a strong sense of relief that he was there.

Obviously, this is a post you should read in its entirety. Digby is fast becoming my favorite political blogger.

If you aren’t reading Dan Washburn’s wonderful reports of his exploits, trials and tribulations as he traverses out-of-the-way parts of China it’s your loss. It’s great! The last one, about trying to buy bus tickets, brought back a flood of memories, and it actually forced me to wonder whether I really want to move back at some point.

I had my own nightmares when I went on a trip to Hangzhou, but I had one thing going for me — I was travelling with a native Chinese friend who was able to come up with solutions to seemingly insurmountable headaches. I don’t think I’d ever travel into rural China without a Chinese guide.

There were so many times when the most simple things became a veritable trial. Washburn’s story reminded me of my very last day in Beijing, when I needed to get my passport photocopied for the movers. I went to a local Kinkos-type place and they were out of toner. A photocopy business, out of toner. Here, the very idea wold be absurd. But there isn’t here.