THE IRAQI CIVIL WAR, A COUP AND THE MIDTERM ELECTIONS (HERE)

Yesterday the A.P. sent an interesting piece over the wires by Tom Raum, "Bush Keeps Revising War Justification." Same ole, same ole? Um... well, maybe not. Yes, it goes through the whole litany of lies about how Bush wanted to find the WMDs Rumsfeld and Cheney knew were there (since they helped Saddam acquire them but forgot to notice had been destroyed by the UN inspectors), how he claimed their were ties to bin-Laden, how U.S. troops were magnanimously "liberating" Iraqis (presumably from the unspeakable burdens of living), and how we were spreading Jeffersonian democracy and one purple finger/one vote (although many Americans wish that would get spread to Florida and Ohio before November 7). And then he started babbling nonsense about "Islamo-fascism," gleefully picked up by the Know-Nothing end of the Republican coalition-- 70-80% of the Noise Machine-driven crazed base-- and the "caliphate." As Raum points out, "The strategy backfired, further fanning anti-American sentiment across the Muslim world."

This morning John Amato at Crooks and Liars caught the other shoe dropping, an interview with the Bush Regime's embedded hack inside the NY Times, David Brooks. No one is supposed to talk about the coup against the incompetent Bush puppet regime in the Green Zone that the Bush Regime has been planning. But Brooks sent up a little trial balloony-thing: "Not really, no I don't. I think they're looking at policy options. One of those options is trying to replace the current government which seems to be doing nothing." Does Brooks speak for the Regime? Um... have you read his execrable column lately?

So all that purple fingers stuff... you mean it meant less to Bush than... control of the Iraqi oil fields? Are they getting ready to green light a (brutal) military dictatorship instead of the flowering democracy Rumsfeld was babbling about on TV a couple days ago again?


My friend Christina pointed out a few days ago that a fake vote in the fake Parliament on federalism was having real consequences in Iraq and in the rest of the Arab world. Bush, exposed as a hypocrite again... and again... and again. Imagine! Was Brooks signaling Bush's acceptance of the "official" start of the Iraqi Civil War? You know Maliki is prime minister because Sadr says ok. Stick Allawai or Don Rumsfeld's and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's pal Chalabi in there and it's all over-- and by "all," I mean the pretense that there is something other than a civil war going on in Iraq.

I don't know if Rove has figured out a way to make this into a talking point that will win some Republican House and Senate seats in 3 weeks-- the only impetus for any "policy" coming out of the White House to begin with-- but it sure makes me nervous that despite every single poll clearly predicting a cataclysmic referendum on the Bush years in the midterm elections resulting in unprecedented Republican congressional losses everywhere, the Regime bosses appear "upbeat".

Has Diebold already shown them the results of November 7th? Rove says the GOP will only lose 8-10 seats. Is that something he told Diebold to program in to their machines? Would the American people accept it? Just asking.