While there are surely many dark twists and turns we could go down, there's one simple explanation for the point Karen M makes about NRO's focus on Cindy Sheehan: They're right!

The most powerful opponent a war can have is the mothers of its soldiers.

And the most powerful single opponent a war can have is the mother of a slain soldier.

The notion of Bush and his top leadership deliberating over anything substantive is so absurd, that I simply dismissed that reporting out of hand. It's not just the "Mayberry Machiavellis" quote. There's this, most memorable, and yet most forgotten piece of reporting released by USA Today on the first anniversary of 9/11:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2002-09-10-iraq-war_x.htm

Lede paragraph:

President Bush's determination to oust Iraq's Saddam Hussein by military force if necessary was set last fall without a formal decision-making meeting or the intelligence assessment that customarily precedes such a momentous decision.

This article, too, had some unidentified sources. But it also had Condi Rice handing them a smoking gun:

The decision to target Saddam "kind of evolved, but it's not clear and neat," a senior administration official says, calling it "policymaking by osmosis."

"There wasn't a flash moment. There's no decision meeting," national security adviser Condoleezza Rice says. "But Iraq had been on the radar screen — that it was a danger and that it was something you were going to have to deal with eventually ... before Sept. 11, because we knew that this was a problem."

So, we're supposed to believe that we went to war with Iraq "by osmossis," but when it came to commutting Scooter's sentence, Bush "Held Long Debate on Decision"?

No, of course not. We're not supposed to remember (or to even known in the first place) that we sumbled into war with Iraq within weeks of 9/11 with no decision process at all.

We're not supposed to remember (or to have known in the first place) how the Bush Administration has never seriously debated any substantive decision about anything.

When the press writes stories like these, it's not as if they have become part of the Administration's propaganda machine. There is nothing "as if" about it. Except, of course, they aren't on the White House payroll.

Except, of course, when they are.

nabalzbbfr:

Spinning contradictions

Glenn doesn't seem to notice that points 1 and 2 are at direct odds with each other. If the mainstream press is just mindlessly parroting partisan talking points, what need is there to embed political operatives to do the same?

It's called redundancy, stupid.

It's called redundancy, stupid.

Karen M:

If not everyone is speaking the same language of Civics, how can we possibly get anywhere but where we are already?

Glenn: In the meantime, perhaps you could cover some basics... just to get everyone on the same page?

Me, I got it in high school civics. A couple of years after I got it in jr. high school civics. But that was back in the stone age, when Mr. Wizard ruled on the educational airwaves.

L.W.M.:

Paul R.,

Do you know if this is this true? I'm inclined to believe it.

more actual deregulation of major industries took place during the Carter and Clinton administrations, than was ever proposed during the sum total of the Nixon, Reagan, Bush and Bush tenures

From a post by David Brin (Michael H. quoted him earlier)

http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2006/05/cato-hypocrisy.html

I'm not even sure how you'd actually metrize this, much less what the figures are, but it's certainly true that deregulation began under Carter, and continued unabated under Clinton (the Telecom Act of 1996, for example). The notion that Carter is a liberal is laughable. Kennedy ran against him in 1980 primaries precisely because his policies were so conservative. That's not to say that deregulation is always bad or always opposed by liberals. But historically in the US, massive deregulation almost always is.

sysprog:

Some deregulation is bad, e.g. Cheney dismantling the EPA.

Some deregulation is good(*).

Carter initiated lots of good deregulation in several industries, including natural gas, airlines, trucking, railroads, telecomms, and financial markets. Carter was a good moderate Republican president in that regard. If Gerry Ford had been elected he'd probably have done some of the same things, but I doubt that he'd have been as effective as Carter was.

Deregulation in trucking lead to massive de-unionization. As just one tiny snapshot of the result, today in the LA/Long Beach harbor complex--responsible for nearly half the container imports into the US--truckers are treated as owner-operators contracted to trucking companies, and generally make only a few dollars above the minimum wage. They can't afford to improve their trucks' pollution controls. The ports are considering a plan that would use a concession system--like with taxis at airports--which would require companies to hire truckers as employees, and purchase new generation diesel trucks that are around 90% less polluting than existing ones--with significant financial assistance to do so. Industry is bitterly opposed.

(BTW, FedEx treats its drivers as "owner-operators," too, but has been losing this battle recently.)

As for financial markets, well, forget the obvious example of the S&Ls, since that didn't occur under Carter. But the trend did. And the trend lead to a massive increase in market capitalization from the Carter Era to the present, while average wages are basically unchanged from where they were when Carter came into office. So you tell me how good that was.