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So now the Pentagon is telling us that only one Iraqi battallion is ready to stand up and fight the insurgents on its own, down from three in June. (Source: AFP, 9/29/05)

But golly never mind that, says Rumsfeld, “the three and the one are irrelevant.” We’re making progress all the time.

Well, if that’s true, what happened over the last few months to those two no-longer-combat-ready battallions?

Rumsfeld says asking questions like that is “chasing the wrong rabbit.”

Now, what’s that supposed to mean?

We’ve gotten so used to Rumsfeld as a one-man a theater of the absurd that we’re not even shocked when his justifications for sending two thousand young Americans to die sound like they were cribbed from Lewis Carroll.

OK, so we’re chasing a rabbit. So what’s the right rabbit? The mission accomplished rabbit? The mushroom cloud rabbit? The bring ‘em on rabbit? The Saddam link to Al Qaeda rabbit? The dead ender rabbit? The fight-them-there-so-we-don’t-fight-them-here rabbit? The torture outsourcing rabbit? The democracy/theocracy crossbreed rabbit?

There are so many screwy rabbits jumping around here, it’s tough to keep track of them all. It’s all more than a bit silly, really. And it would be great fun.

Except, of course, for all the emotional and physical damage, the destruction to families and communities in Iraq and the U.S., the aimless loss of hope amid unending tours of duty extended and extended again, the youth of America cast into a pit of moral chaos where patriotism and noble cause transform day by day into a nightmarish anarchic amorality where swapping snuff photos for porn is just par for the course.

Yes, aside from all that, Rumsfeld nattering on like the Mad Hatter is very amusing indeed.

A story we’ll be watching today: It turns out that the source for Judith Miller’s unpublished story about Valerie Plame’s secret identity as an undercover CIA agent was Lewis Libby, chief of staff to Dick Cheney.

Oh, sure, the White House knew nothing about the leak.

Judith Miller willl testify in front of the grand jury today. Will she name Karl Rove as well, corroborating other witnesses? We’ll wait and see. More to come…

Before you hire someone for a job, it’s generally expected that they tell you some things. Have they done this kind of job before? What did they do on the job? What’s their overall understanding of what they do, and how do they go about their work? What do they plan to do when you hire them?

Apparently not if you hire them for a lifetime appointment to the highest court in America, as we have seen with Justice Roberts.

Now, I’ve just got to ask: Would you hire someone who interviewed like Roberts, even for a more or less trivial job like interior decorator? What would that question-and-answer session look like:

Norman: So you do interior decorating?

Decorator: Sure, I have over twenty years experience.

Norman: Wow, sounds impressive. Who have you worked for?

Decorator: Well, there’s the President of the United States.

Norman: Huh. What did you do for him?

Decorator: Afraid I can’t tell you. Executive privilege and all.

Norman: Oh, right, of course. Any before and after pictures?

Decorator: Nope, it’s a secret.

Norman: OK, sure. Now, I happen to know you were involved in a certain lime-green painting episode that didn’t turn out so well over at the Joneses. Do you think that was a mistake?

Decorator: My advice to paint lime green in that case was determined by my obligation to serve my client’s interest.

Norman: So you wouldn’t have done it if the Joneses didn’t specifically demand it?

Decorator: Well, I was representing the Joneses in that case.

Norman: What if a client asked you to smash out all their windows and spray-paint graffiti on their home, would you do it?

Decorator: I think we’re getting into hypotheticals here.

Norman: Right. Well, since all the interior decorating you’ve done in the past is a big secret, and you’re not going to tell me what you would do in any hypothetical case, let me ask you some questions about your general decorating philosophy. Do you believe in creating big, open spaces? Or do you prefer to create a cozy, intimate feel?

Decorator: I never commit to any decorating strategy before I see the house. I’m open minded.

Norman: So, chiffon. Do you like chiffon?

Decorator: I believe chiffon is entitled to respect as a time-honored staple of the interior decorating industry.

Norman: Would you use it?

Decorator: I’m not going to tell you specifically or generally how I have decorated houses in the past or how I would or wouldn’t decorate any house I might see in the future.

Norman: And in the present?

Decorator: In the present I’m standing here talking to you.

Norman: Oh yeah, good point. Hey, say no more. You’re hired.

One day after Private Lynndie England was given a short three-year sentence for her role in the sexual humiliation and torture of Iraqis in the American Abu Ghraib prison, new reports have come out about horrific abuses by Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Apparently, American soldiers in both countries are taking trophy photographs of dead Iraqis and Afghans. In these photographs, the American soldiers place the dead people in poses before photographing them. In some photos, American soldiers hold up parts of human bodies, dangling in the air before the camera.

The American soldiers have been caught using the trophy photographs of dead people to trade for access to pornographic pictures on the Internet.

What was it that Bush said about waging war in order to spread America’s values around the world? Was this what he had in mind?

This afternoon, Cindy Sheehan and 369 other pro-peace activists were arrested and hauled off to jail. Their crime? They were on a sidewalk.

George W. Bush deceived Congress to wage a war that violates international law. Bush has broken U.S. laws that forbid torture. Bush has also violated U.S. law by refusing to honor the Geneva Conventions. Bush’s crimes even include using government funds for partisan political propaganda. Yes, that’s a federal crime.

But, who has taken George W. Bush to jail? Who in law enforcement has even begun an investigation of George W. Bush’s crimes?

No one. Why, it makes one wonder if George W. Bush is above the law or something.

Oh, but we are to understand that being on a sidewalk – well, that’s a really serious crime. Cindy Sheehan and her sidewalk-sitting group of activists are a really big danger to America because, you see, if we didn’t stop them from sitting on sidewalks, well, then America might have even more people sitting on sidewalks.

Compared to such a threat, we are to understand, George W. Bush’s crimes are insignificant. Carry on as usual, America. There’s nothing to see here.

OK, help me out here. This just looks too stupid to be true.

Four years after 9/11, two and a half years after we rushed to war in a mad terror that weapons of mass destruction would be used on American cities, three weeks after Hurricane Katrina, the Bush administration has just now clued in that maybe there should be some kind of national search and rescue strategy in place for major disasters in American cities?

So if there’s a disaster, you, like, save people? Well there’s a thought. I swear I could have come up with that. I would have suggested it to Bush myself. But I kind of got put off to the whole thing after the last time I called the local city hall, to suggest that the next time a house caught fire they should just squirt water at it through a big hose. They assured me they already had people on it, and they didn’t need my help coming up with clever ideas thank you very much. Guess I just assumed the same about the federal government. Oops.

Did I miss something? Wasn’t this new Department of Homeland Security supposed to be, like, saving people from big disasters? FEMA’s part of that, right? Doesn’t that “EM” stand for “Emergency Management?”

OK, I’m going to say something about managing emergencies that, to me, seems painfully obvious. But clearly Bush doesn’t get it, so I’ll spell it out in language he can understand:

There are places where very very many people live. They are called cities. Sometimes, something very very bad happens in a city, and all the people in that city need to leave very very fast. But it is very hard to get everybody out of a big city very fast. Not all people in big cities have cars. The roads can get crowded. That’s why the government of the whole country needs to make a special plan to find people who didn’t get out and help them leave. A plan like that is called a “national search-and-rescue strategy.”

There, Bush. First grade level. Get it now? OK, let’s go over that again…

The biggest anti-war marches since the start of the Iraqetnam War will take place tomorrow in Washington D.C. and San Francisco.

If you can’t make it to either of those places, go to a march closer to home. If there isn’t a march closer to home, get out on a street corner with some friends. If you don’t have friends, go alone. If you can’t make it to any marches, contact your local media and tell them to cover the protests. If they don’t cover them, write a letter to the editor asking why they didn’t.

There’s something everyone can do. And for pity’s sake don’t say protesting accomplishes nothing. Doing nothing accomplishes nothing. Politicians in both parties are starting to finally figure out that Bush’s “stay the course” bull just doesn’t cut it, and Americans want out of Iraq. The louder the American public demands an exit strategy, the sooner we’re going to get one.

So get out there and make some noise!

For thirty years, America avoided another Vietnam. Sure, we bombed, invaded, and generally shot up a few places: Libya, Grenada, Panama, The Former Yugoslavia, Somalia, The Sudan, places like that. But we generally did it at arm’s length by means of anything from cruise missiles to funding local insurgents in places like El Salvador and Nicaragua. We got in, we killed people, we got out. Even Ronald Reagan got us the hell out of Lebanon when we took casualties.

So what happened? Well, 9/11 happened. And 9/11 “changed everything,” right?

Wrong. Four years after 9/11 we are back in Vietnam, and Bush is rehashing the same old bull we heard from Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967.

Sure, it’s not exactly Vietnam. It’s not exactly 1967. But the parallels are too strong to ignore. We did not learn our lesson from Vietnam.

Once again, we have American soldiers patrolling hostile territory, taking fire from an enemy that just disappears into the population. Once again, we are forced to fight for control of towns and cities, only to have insurgents creep back in the moment we leave. Once again, our hopes for ever leaving with honor are pinned on somehow building up a weak, corrupt government.

When are we going to learn?