GG rightly notes that the AP Mukasey canonization piece isn't particularly novel in approach, it's just another example of pathetic pablum propaganda journalism.

But there's more to a piece of AP journalism than the text. There's also the facts of timinig and the ability to exclude meaningful reporting by using the scarce commodity of allocated column inches for tripe.

Case in point, and this is to me immensely unbelievable: where is discussion of the Yoo memo (or the Vanity Fair article that probably provides the explanation for why the Yoo memo was released when it was) in the Sunday papers today? I mean, not a single word in the NYT Week in Review. Is the "news cycle" over? How can that be? Oh, the AP ran that piece about the nice Mr. Mukasey, what could be amiss on the "Justice" front if he's so nice? Let's not rile people up by revisiting that "no longer in force" Yoo memo, it's so last Tuesday.

The "theories" so glibly articulated in the Yoo memo are breathtaking in their mendacity. Breathtaking. The President has no limits on his authority in "wartime"? If the President authorizes torture, the torturer has a defense that he was engaging in "self defense of the US against terrorists?" Does anyone want to ask whether that means the President could order the summary execution of Muslims in the US? Of course it would -- and if the response is "yeah, but of course W would never do that, though he technically would have the Constitutional authority", isn't a "trust me" answer smack in the middle of a rule of men, not of laws? And that's just one plain reading of one facet of the Yoo memo -- which is admitted to have been the secret governing policy of the United States government acting through the Bush Administration. Maybe that's newsworthy.

What we've seen, instead, is two days of comments on the "gee, that was unfortunate" vein -- not at all unlike Gov. LePetomaine in Blazing Saddles "I didn't get a harrumph from that guy... we've got to protect our phony baloney jobs here."

Mukasey's San Francisco comments are digusting and have rightly been exposed by GG and picked up on by others, and the sickness driving those comments is part of the same infection that allowed Yoo's memo to fester. But that the AP has consciously chosen to allow itself to devote it's main national Saturday political reporting release to be devoted to a damage control puff piece instead of analysis of what the Yoo memo says about the Bush Adminstration -- or even seeking to find out what the Bush Administration is willing to say about the outrageous stuff in that memo that has just been released -- is pathetic. It's propaganda. Propaganda. Goebbels would be proud.