Just in case you think there’s any legitimacy to the certifiable lunatics behind the new anti-Kerry book, please go here for some quick enlightenment.

I was delighted to see John McLaughlin side with Eleanor Clift on last night’s McLaughlin Group to condemn the book — and to criticize bush for not openly and personally condemning it. The two almost never agree; when he joined her recently in calling the Iraq war a mistake, it was big news. Wonderful to see how bush continues to alienate intelligent conservatives.

Update: Great wrap-up post on the whole mess over at Skippy.

Lest we forget just how agonizingly stupid our commander in chief really is:

Q:What do you think tribal sovereignty means in the 21st century, and how do we resolve conflicts between tribes and the federal and the state governments?

THE PRESIDENT: Tribal sovereignty means that, it’s sovereign. You’re a — you’ve been given sovereignty, and you’re viewed as a sovereign entity. And, therefore, the relationship between the federal government and tribes is one between sovereign entities.

The most powerful man in the history of the planet, and he’s dumber than a brick.

Via Oliver Willis.

The angriest column I’ve read in the NYT to date.

The nation seems paralyzed, unsure of what to do about Iraq or terrorism. The failure of leadership that led to the bonehead decision to invade Iraq remains painfully evident today. Nobody seems to know where we go from here.

What Americans need more than anything else right now is some honest information about the critical situations we’re facing.

What’s the military mission in Iraq? Can it be clearly defined? Is it achievable? At what cost and over what time frame? How many troops will be needed? How many casualties are we willing to accept? And how much suffering are we willing to endure here at home in terms of the domestic needs that are unmet?

Neither Lyndon Johnson nor Richard Nixon was honest with the American people about Vietnam, and the result was a monumental tragedy. George W. Bush has not leveled with the nation about Iraq, and we are again trapped in a long, tragic nightmare.

As for the so-called war on terror, there is no evidence yet that the administration has a viable plan for counteracting Al Qaeda and its America-hating allies, offshoots and imitators. Whether this week’s clumsy sequence of press conferences, leaks and alerts was politically motivated or not, the threat to the U.S. is both real and grave. And it can’t be thwarted with military power alone.

Does the administration have any real sense of what motivates the nation’s enemies? Does it understand the ways in which American policies are empowering its enemies? Does it grasp the crucial importance of international alliances and coordinated intelligence activity in fighting terror? And is it even beginning to think seriously about lessening our debilitating dependence on Middle Eastern oil?

The United States is the greatest military and economic power in the history of the planet. But it lacks a unifying sense of national purpose at the moment, and seems uncertain, even timid, as the national security challenges continue to mount. That is what a failure of leadership can do to a great power.

A failure of leadership. Indeed. And national security is somehow seen as bush’s strong point!! It’s actually his very most miserable failure, even worse than his wreckage of the US economy.

Read the whole thing; it’s among Herbert’s very best pieces.

Photo of Yu Zhenhuan

I actually saw this story on CNN this morning. Picture this: Chinese rock musician Yu Zhenhuan is so hirsute, he had to get hair removed from his ears in a surgical procedure in Shanghai because it had reduced his hearing by more than 30 percent.

Doctors said Yu had complained of constant earaches and nausea and had lost one-third of his hearing, Xinhua said.

Yu was recognised in 2002 as the world’s hairiest man by the Guinness Book of World Records, Xinhua said.

Yu’s body, save the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet, is covered with an average of 41 hairs per one sq cm, a condition doctors term “atavism”, it said.

The hirsute 26-year-old Yu, a rock-and-roll singer, made his entertainment debut at the age of six in a movie about “a hairy child’s adventure”, the state news agency said.

Definitely news of the weird.

Bush is seen as invulnerable on national security; never mind that his record is a catastrophe — he nonetheless has succeeded in conveying the message that he’s “strong” and “stays the course.” So it’s refreshing to see that Kerry is dramatically closing the once yawning gap between them on this issue.

Democrat John Kerry, whose nominating convention highlighted his war service and focused on national security, has narrowed the gap on President Bush’s strong suit of protecting the country, according to an Associated Press poll that shows the race remains tight….

In the AP survey conducted Tuesday through Thursday, 43 percent said Kerry would do a better job of protecting the country — a gain of 8 percentage points for the Democratic presidential nominee from a similar survey in March.

Kerry improved his standing on the issue with a demographic group that tends to lean Republican: men under age 45.

Bush still has the advantage on the issue, with 52 percent saying the Republican incumbent would do better in protecting the nation. But Bush’s percentage on the issue has dropped 6 percentage points since March, according to the poll conducted for the AP by Ipsos-Public Affairs, and the latest survey was taken as he faced questions about dated intelligence for increased terror alerts

Sweet. The polls aren’t necessarily showing a post-convention bounce for Kerry (how could they, with such a polarized electorate?), but they are showing a dramatic increase in the number of people who now say they believe he is fit to serve as president. This is great news when it comes to swing voters.

bush’s predictable dirty-tricks surprises are duds so far, and if he doesn’t pull off a major miracle over the next 11 weeks he won’t win. Right now, especially with today’s embarrassing jobs report, he’s got precious little to point to in terms of results and achievements.

Check it out — Giblets puts the whole thing in perspective. Snip:

* How many purple hearts did John Kerry really earn, two or three? Giblets speculates: NONE AT ALL! Giblets recalls that while John Kerry was flinging himself in front of Viet Cong machine gun fire and rescuing pregnant villagers, he was also saying quite clearly, “If only these fools knew that I was only risking death so that I could accumulate a supply of medals, throw them away during antiwar protests, and use my injuries to climb the political ladder to become the most despicable tyrant America has ever seen!” It’s true I think I have it on tape somewhere.

* He opposed the war! After cravenly fighting in Vietnam for his country, John Kerry then returned to his country to OPPOSE the war in Vietnam – a war that history has proven to be not only justified, but overwhelmingly popular and morally courageous! We Swift Boat Veterans for Trooth™ stood on the right side of history along with Nixon and Agnew and Kissinger and McNamara! Where did John Kerry stand?

Sometimes good satire drives home the simplest trooths. Thank you, Giblets.

I’ve been thinking about it for weeks now: What happened to Iraq? It’s as though it fell into a black hole. I watch the News Hour on PBS, and they’re showing just as many young soldiers at the end of the show as they were months ago, and often more. (They close each program with photos of the American soldiers recently kiiled in Iraq.) And yet, there seems to be no urgency in the reporting anywhere.

Think back to the weeks after space-suit shrub landed on his Mission Accomplished aircraft carrier. That’s when we first heard the shocking news: one US soldier was being picked off here, another there. It was huge news. It was terrible and urgent and we were all riveted. “Bring ’em on,” shrub challenged, and they took him up on the offer. It kept getting worse until finally it seemed to climax in April, with Najaf and Fallujah. Reports of four or more US soldiers murdered in a single day became commonplace, but they were still appalling. They totally dominated the news, and the nation was obsessed with them — as it should have been.

Najaf died down after we flip-flopped on our promise to get al Sadr dead or alive, and Fallujah went away after we flip-flopped on our promise to restore law and order and bring to justice those who murdered 4 US contractors (we never brought anyone to justice, and we retreated, handing power over to an old Ba’athist strongman). And then we had our hurried, secretive “handover of power,” and with that, media coverage of Iraq seemed to take on a whole new tone.

I’m not the only one who’s noticed this.

A funny thing happened after the United States transferred sovereignty over Iraq. On the ground, things didn’t change, except for the worse.

But as Matthew Yglesias of The American Prospect puts it, the cosmetic change in regime had the effect of “Afghanizing” the media coverage of Iraq.

He’s referring to the way news coverage of Afghanistan dropped off sharply after the initial military defeat of the Taliban. A nation we had gone to war to liberate and had promised to secure and rebuild – a promise largely broken – once again became a small, faraway country of which we knew nothing.

Incredibly, the same thing happened to Iraq after June 28. Iraq stories moved to the inside pages of newspapers, and largely off TV screens. Many people got the impression that things had improved. Even journalists were taken in: a number of newspaper stories asserted that the rate of U.S. losses there fell after the handoff. (Actual figures: 42 American soldiers died in June, and 54 in July.)

The trouble with this shift of attention is that if we don’t have a clear picture of what’s actually happening in Iraq, we can’t have a serious discussion of the options that remain for making the best of a very bad situation.

The military reality in Iraq is that there has been no letup in the insurgency, and large parts of the country seem to be effectively under the control of groups hostile to the U.S.-supported government.

Read the whole thing for a very grim reminder of how we are losing this war. Everything bush could have won points on has failed — the truce with al Sadr, the agreement to send Saudi troops to Iraq, Allawi’s announcement of an amnesty (oh, that’s a good one — see Krugman’s final paragraph).

So if you think the recent silence from Iraq is a good thing, if you believe we are “winning” and that everything’s under control, please think again. The situation is worse, not better; it’s just that it’s dropped off the media’s radar screen, supplanted by the elections and the unfortunate complacency that followed the so-called handover.

This is cool; I actually made it onto a list of “seditionists,” along with several other liberal blogs like Pandagon, Atrios and World O’Crap. Not only are we seditionists, but they’re “keeping a close eye” on us, like maybe they’ll come in the night and burn our houses down.

Looking at their mission statement, I tend to think the entire thing may be a prank.

Established in the spring of 2004, The Project for the New American Empire is a non-profit, educational organization whose goal is to promote American hegemony over the world by the violent overthrow of Evil. The Project is an initiative of the Hamilton Institute for the Unilateral Projection of Power (666c69); the HAIUPP’s chairman is Demogenes Aristophanes and its president emeritus is Kilroy.

Seriously, the whole thing looks like a joke. I sure hope so.

This is definitely a bombshell. It’s good to see that at least one member of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth has some integrity left.

Merrie Spaeth, the PR consultant for the group and a former PR person for Ronald Reagan, must be going ballistic. Now they’ll try to say that there’s so much the other members agree on, they couldn’t possibly be making it up. Of course they can; they’re being managed by a master of “staying on message” and they’re being funded by a wealthy Texas Republican who remains anonymous (that came out on Hannity and Colmes last night). Of course they’ll all say the same thing.

Today’s retraction, however, proves that a major contention they make in the ad and in their book is a lie: Kerry did indeed deserve his Silver Star, the retractor now says. I’m sure the Republicans who ordered their copy of the book early will manage to brush this aside, but most of us know better.

Yes, this episode will definitely end up a big net minus for the GOP. Thank you, Ms. Spaeth, and I’d love to know how you sleep at night.

We all know by now about Drudge’s latest hatchet job in which he gives considerable space to the “Swift Boat Veterans For Truth” to accuse John Kerry of utterly horrendous crimes and monstrous behavior, from shooting teens to burning villages to torturing animals.

Of course, Drudge lets them tell their whole story, and includes a line or two from the Kerry camp saying the SBVFT are lying.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this, even though it makes me sick. Atrios and others have pointed out the nuttiness of the charges, and the fact that all of the men who actually served with Kerry on his swift boat went to Boston to endorse him for president. (The one who didn’t was dead.) And the obvious question arises, were Kerry truly guilty of such heinous crimes and all of these men witnessed them, why were they silent for 30-some years? Is it a coincidence that they are just stepping forward weeks before the election? Yeah, that must be it; a coincidence.

I just saw on the news that bush is distancing himself from the TV ad, and McCain has angrily condemned it. It’s got to remind him of the way Bush smeared him in 2000. This is the ugliest episode of the campaign yet, but it looks like it may well backfire and even cause bush some embarrassment.

Update: Another good link on this story is here.

UPDATE: I just watched a rather remarkable segment of the O’Reilly Factor in which Big Bill himself and smear meister Dick Morris both condemned the ad and said it was a horrible mistake that would create all sorts of problems for bush. Morris said — and I agree — that there’s no way a bunch of disgruntled vets could come up with the cash for their expensive ad without help from a big Republican source, and when this is investigated there may be a Republican scandal. I never thought I’d have praise for O’Reilly, let alone Dick Morris, but it’s due in this instance. That said, I still think they’re both scumbags.