Great article.  With a twist at the end: 

It should surprise few readers that we think a vote that is seen—in America and the world at large—as a decisive “No” vote on the Bush presidency is the best outcome. We need not dwell on George W. Bush’s failed effort to jam a poorly disguised amnesty for illegal aliens through Congress or the assaults on the Constitution carried out under the pretext of fighting terrorism or his administration’s endorsement of torture. Faced on Sept. 11, 2001 with a great challenge, President Bush made little effort to understand who had attacked us and why—thus ignoring the prerequisite for crafting an effective response. He seemingly did not want to find out, and he had staffed his national-security team with people who either did not want to know or were committed to a prefabricated answer. 

As a consequence, he rushed America into a war against Iraq, a war we are now losing and cannot win, one that has done far more to strengthen Islamist terrorists than anything they could possibly have done for themselves. Bush’s decision to seize Iraq will almost surely leave behind a broken state divided into warring ethnic enclaves, with hundreds of thousands killed and maimed and thousands more thirsting for revenge against the country that crossed the ocean to attack them. The invasion failed at every level: if securing Israel was part of the administration’s calculation—as the record suggests it was for several of his top aides—the result is also clear: the strengthening of Iran’s hand in the Persian Gulf, with a reach up to Israel’s northern border, and the elimination of the most powerful Arab state that might stem Iranian regional hegemony. 

The war will continue as long as Bush is in office, for no other reason than the feckless president can’t face the embarrassment of admitting defeat. The chain of events is not complete: Bush, having learned little from his mistakes, may yet seek to embroil America in new wars against Iran and Syria. 

Meanwhile, America’s image in the world, its capacity to persuade others that its interests are common interests, is lower than it has been in memory. All over the world people look at Bush and yearn for this country—which once symbolized hope and justice—to be humbled. The professionals in the Bush administration (and there are some) realize the damage his presidency has done to American prestige and diplomacy. But there is not much they can do. 

So what’s the twist?  This article was published by The American Conservative!  (much more, full article here ) 

I’ve been expressing surprise for a while about the curious duality of the modern conservative movement.  Small government, fiscal responsibility, and military prudence have always been the hallmarks of the conservative philosophy.  Yet it is laughable to apply any of these criteria to the Bush administration.  By all rational accounts, this president is the anti-conservative.  And yet over the past six years, I’ve been repeatedly dumbfounded, scratching my head at the torrent of hypocritical conservative adoration as each colossal failure follows the last.   

We’ll see how far this goes beyond election season.  But for now, I can hope that maybe the voice of reason is in the ascendancy.

Sting operation reveals that military recruiters are lying to enlistees:

ABC News and New York affiliate WABC equipped students with hidden video cameras before they visited 10 Army recruitment offices in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

"Nobody is going over to Iraq anymore?" one student asks a recruiter.

"No, we're bringing people back," he replies.

"We're not at war. War ended a long time ago," another recruiter says.

Last year, the Army suspended recruiting nationwide to retrain recruiters following hundreds of allegations of improprieties.

One Colorado student taped a recruiting session posing as a drug-addicted dropout.

"You mean I'm not going to get in trouble?" the student asked.

The recruiters told him no, and helped him cheat to sign up.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Operating under an impossible quota can put unbearable pressure upon anyone, much less someone trying to convince people to place their lives in danger. It’s just another sad commentary on the complete dearth of righteousness in Team Bush’s foreign policy.

Fellow nerds delight!  This may be the funniest damn pie-chart joke ever invented by mere mortals.

While most of the auto-mo-tans in the US were busy frothing at the mouth over a botched joke (not much mention of the botched war), there were a slew of new GOP scandals brewing.

• George Allen allowed his “thugs” to physically assault a US marine attempting to ask a question. At a campaign rally. About matters of public record. And lest the Allen camp try to play it off as over-sensationalized, the entire thing was caught on camera. Allen could have stopped this fascist, anti-American brutality with a word, but instead just watched it happen without a moment’s restraint. Mike Stark, the marine and Law student at the University of Virginia, has issued a statement on the assault and will be filing charges against Allen later today.
• Jim Gibbons, the Republican Senator from Nevada, is now adding bribery to his growing list of scandals, including sexual assault and illegal employment practices.
• On Iraqi orders, George Bush abandons a U.S. soldier behind enemy lines, in complete defiance of military tradition and necessity. On the orders of a government incapable of conducting their own military affairs. A soldier has likely been tortured and killed so Bush and Maliki could pretend that Iraq is a sovereign nation before election day. A country that now claims to need an additional $100 billion in aid in order to rebuild its infrastructure. That Bush destroyed. That never got rebuilt with the various congressional aid packages already marked for reconstruction. Billions of which is missing.

Glad the mainstream media is focusing priorities on parroting the really important GOP talking points on Kerry instead of anything of actual import.