today's menu

first the basics:
If you haven't already, Read Your Krugman!!! Today's installment: The Last Deception -- although I am not so optimistic that this is the last one (already, we can add today's Bush speech to the U.N. to the list, but I will get to that later if I have time).

Brooks I won't even link to because the last time I tried to decode him my headache lasted for hours. An expert at feints and dodges, omissions and elisions, misrepresentations and convenient amnesia (for instance, he himself, like fellow conservatives George Will, William F. Buckley and numerous others, condemned the Iraq war months ago, but quickly returned to singing the chorus, playing what Digby calls the Mighty Wurlitzer -- did he fear losing his access to White House soirees? did the order come down from Rove? did he forget that his position in life is not to seek and purvey truth but to promote the party line no matter how far the party deviates from even its own supposed principles? I don't know, but I digress.... Josh Marshall elucidates things today so I don't have to.

Over at WaPo, E.J. Dionne asks What is Bush Hiding? regarding National Guard service. Very cogent piece, pulling together a number of threads, concluding:

I'm as weary as you are that our politics veer away from what matters -- Iraq, terrorism, health care, jobs -- and get sidetracked into personal issues manufactured by political consultants and ideological zealots. But the Bush campaign has made clear it wants this election to focus on character and leadership. If character is the issue, the president's life, past and present, matters just as much as John Kerry's.

Dan Rather has answered his critics. Now it is Bush's turn.

Over at the Guardian, Sy Hersh, the man most responsible for breaking the Abu Ghraib story, has a couple of excerpts from his new book on the topic -- for those of you who might care about quaint notions like the rule of law, the U.S. Constitution, the Geneva Conventions, not to mention morality or the safety of our troops.