This just in from the Washington Post:

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki on Wednesday proposed a limited amnesty to help end the Sunni Arab insurgency as part of a national reconciliation plan that Maliki said would be released within days. The plan is likely to include pardons for those who had attacked only U.S. troops, a top adviser said.

I have to wonder what is going on here. Bush hand-picked this guy after a strong-armed push to oust the previous democratically-elected stooge Prime Minister. Yet this is not the first time the guy has enacted a controversial policy that seems to fly directly into the face of Bush's Cowboy Foreign Policy without a peep of protest from the White House. My guess is that President Bush Cheney has cut some kind of deal with the guy to play the role of maverick in order to help Bush justify an early retreat with his right-wing base. Either that or Bush has finally come around to the fact that his position is a miserable failure with no hope of success. I'm inclined to believe the former.

You gotta love this little gem from the always-entertaining George Will (another George W?):

To understand the diabolical genius of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, that pornographer of violence, begin with this:

He was a primitive who understood the wired world and used an emblem of modernity, the Internet, to luxuriate in gore. But although he may have had an almost erotic enjoyment of the gore, it was also in the service of an audacious plan. And he executed it with such brutal efficiency that he became, arguably, the most effective terrorist in history.

This only betrays the GOP strategy of dehumanizing insurgents in order to justify killing, torture, and civilian collateral damage. It's much easier to convince ordinarily good people to do these things when you convince them they're facing a slasher addict / pornographer who is gleefully masturbating behind his keyboard while watching Americans die. It's quite another to acknowledge your own complicity in his creation (while simultaneously abhorring his tactics). But I suppose to do that would be to admit that all this gratuitous killing has been in vain.

ATR is offerning an exhaustive parsing of Peter Beinart's lies overstatements on WMDs in his interview with Kevin Drum. Go check it out, it's definitely worth the read.

But this brand of fact-checking is a hallmark of the modern Republican ideologue. Rather than testing a hypothesis, they begin from an unwavering opinion and then cherrypick the information supporting it while discounting evidence to the contrary - regardless of how preponderant it may be.

At best this is simply poor scholarship, at worst it is a concerted revisioning of a means vs. ends argument; the very revisioning that totalitarian regimes have always espounded.

It reminds me of that quote by Hannah Arendt, "Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines, totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself."

Hurrican season is upon us and FEMA has still failed to secure any coordinated leadership . 

Chertoff said the agency is still working to confirm a regional director to oversee a seven-state region that includes the nation's most frequent hurricane targets.

Three other regions - the Gulf Coast, the mid-Atlantic and the northern plains states - lack permanent directors, although experienced interim officials are in charge.

I can readily admit that I've never trusted, liked, or even much tolerated Bush's presence in government.  I was living in Austin while he was governor, so my distaste for the man has roots very much pre-dating his presidency.  However, I have to say that were his policies or competence tolerable in any aspect, I could look past his irritating smirk and priviliged hubris.  However, the guy just makes tragic mistake after mistake and just never learns.  Even this might be somewhat humerous were it not that people - real people - die for his mistakes.