Have things really gotten that bad? → U.S. citizens aren’t rising to the challenge → independent press oversight lacking → unreliable establishment spokespersons frame debate

Baghdad, — The U.S. executive selected by the Pentagon to advise Iraq’s Ministry of Oil suggested that the country might best be served by exporting as much oil as it can and disregarding quotas set by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.… Iraq’s resumption of oil exports under a new government would expose OPEC to considerable uncertainty. Iraq has the world’s second-largest proven oil reserves. Flows of Iraqi oil to the world market unconstrained by OPEC quotas could further erode the cartel’s already limited ability to set prices and might even trigger a price war, eating into the profits of its member countries. Such an outcome would surely delight the Bush administration as well as buyers of gasoline in the United States, the world’s largest oil consumer.

Baghdad, Iraq, — In an abrupt reversal, the United States and Britain have indefinitely put off their plan to allow Iraqi opposition forces to form a national assembly and an interim government by . Instead, top American and British diplomats leading reconstruction efforts here told exile leaders in a meeting that allied officials would remain in charge of Iraq for an indefinite period, said Iraqis who attended the meeting. It was conducted by L. Paul Bremer, the new civilian administrator here.

London (AFP) — Finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is not vital to justify the decision by London and Washington to invade the country, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said Wednesday.

Washington — The search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction could take years to complete, a senior Pentagon official told Congress . The testimony by Douglas Feith, under secretary of Defense for policy, was the most pessimistic appraisal yet by a top Bush administration official of one of the White House’s key justifications for the invasion of Iraq.

And so, with remarkable speed and clarity, the cynical predictions of the peace movement have come to pass. The joker in the hemp sandals and the “no blood for oil” placard had things pegged a lot more truly than the suit-and-tie from the State Department on MSNBC. But if you just stick your fingers in your ears and hum the theme to Survivor really really loudly, you can bypass the cognitive dissonance and go directly into red-white-and-blue denial.

Timothy Noah, in Slate notes that you can still be taken seriously if you admit, like Noah has, that you were wrong in exaggerating Iraq’s threat and that you were mistaken in advocating war. And you can still be taken seriously even if you don’t admit those things and continue to bullheadedly insist that Saddam was a dangerous threat to the United States that had to be taken out with haste. “But the oddest outcome concerns not those who were wrong about Iraq, but those who were right. The political mainstream shuns them.”

Not long ago, I spoke with a Democratic moderate about the war in Iraq. He said he considered support for the Iraq war to be a necessary prerequisite to assuming any powerful role in the party. It showed that the person in question was willing to project U.S. force abroad. But wait, I asked. Do you still think the Iraq war was a good idea? After some hemming and hawing, he admitted that he’d rather we hadn’t gone in. Then why make support for a mistaken policy a litmus test? Because, he repeated, it shows that the person in question is willing to project U.S. force abroad. I should emphasize that we weren’t talking about whether troops should be withdrawn from Iraq, which is an entirely separate and vexing question that speaks to our responsibility in a country whose previous government we destroyed. What this man was saying was that it was better to have been wrong about Iraq than to have been right. That’s the prevailing (though not always conscious) consensus in Washington, and it’s completely insane.

And in an attempt to further discredit these modern-day “premature antifascists,” the CIA plans to issue a report speculating on what kinds of terrible weapons Saddam might have been able to create by if he hadn’t been taken out.

There’s no telling what they might load onto this rickety cart, since crystal-ball gazings like this are unverifiable and unfalsifiable, since any number of things might happen in the future, and since the CIA doesn’t seem to mind being used as a political tool even if that means they must be completely, ineptly wrong even about the present.

Whatever science fiction they come up with, you can bet that it will justify the invasion, and will produce headlines (due to hit the front pages, oh, right about the time of the Republican convention) along the lines of “Saddam Could Have Had Nukes Able to Hit U.S. By If Not Stopped, Says Report.”

Aboard the good ship USS State of Denial is such a meal that I haven’t begun to digest it yet.

[E]ven the most recent media dismantling of the administration’s various explanations for war seems to have affected the President’s supporters and the administration itself only marginally. No matter how many times these explanations have been torpedoed and sent to the bottom, they (or their cousins) just pop up again like so many Schmoos.

It’s hard to keep up with slang. I remember when we used to use the word “bogus” to refer to anything disagreeable. But by expanding the use of that word from its original meaning of “counterfeit, fake, phony, misrepresented as genuine” it left a gap in the syntactosphere and some new slang had to come in to fill in for the vacated specificity.

Leave it to that master wordsmith Colin Powell to come up with the replacement: “solid”

Some bits and pieces from around the great big web:

  • One way to avoid paying taxes to whatever jurisdiction is lording it over you would be to move to another jurisdiction. The problem is figuring out how to take your assets with you before the folks in the revenue office figure out what you’re up to. Kathleen Macaulay has written up her advice for people considering what she calls the “ultimate estate plan” — taxpatriatism — in the wake of new laws that changed the rules for U.S. taxpatriates .
  • Matthew Yglesias notes that the news media allowed themselves to be used as a propaganda arm of the military-industrial complex, shamelessly and without remorse. To which IOZ responds — allowed themselves? hell — they’re an essential part of the military-industrial complex. Who do you think owns NBC?
  • Trying to convince folks that their tax dollars might be better spent by anyone but the Pentagon? You could do worse than pointing to them to a new report from the Center for Defense Information about Pentagon waste and budgetary shenanigans.
  • Bureaucrash, the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s attempt to make capitalist ideology hip and exciting to the Internet generation, is sponsoring a “crasher challenge” — “a monthly drive to inspire activism on a specific issue. We’ll help provide the initial resources to help you and other crashers get your creative juices flowing and we encourage you to share those resources that you create. At the end of the month, the best submission (i.e. video, documented crash, writing, etc.) will be rewarded with Contraband t-shirts and props on Bureaucrash Social.” This month’s challenge is called Stop Wars and it would be ideal for a project that ties taxation to warfare.
  • Fans of alternatives to government monopoly currency may want to keep an eye on OurNexChange, an Ashland, Oregon based “time dollar”-like currency that looks as though it will be mashed up with a LETS-style database. Beware, though, they don’t seem to have any interest in making this a challenge to the IRS, and are already building in mechanisms to report your barter and alternative currency earnings to the government.

Some tidbits from Pentagon Spending Billions on PR to Sway World Opinion:

This year, the Pentagon will employ 27,000 people just for recruitment, advertising and public relations — almost as many as the total 30,000-person work force in the State Department.

On an abandoned Air Force base in San Antonio, Texas, editors for the Joint Hometown News Service point proudly to a dozen clippings on a table as examples of success in getting stories into newspapers.

What readers are not told: Each of these glowing stories was written by Pentagon staff. Under the free service, stories go out with authors’ names but not their titles, and do not mention Hometown News anywhere. In , Hometown News plans to put out 5,400 press releases, 3,000 television releases and 1,600 radio interviews, among other work — 50 percent more than in .

The service is just a tiny piece of the Pentagon’s rapidly expanding media empire, which is now bigger in size, money and power than many media companies.

At times it’s difficult to know who is fooling whom and for what motives. The article points to one case in which, when General Petraeus was asked by a reporter about the popular mood in Iraq, he held up a poster of the Iraq soccer team as a way of showing how the country was putting sectarian feuds behind it and was rallying around its national sports team. The article implies that Petraeus himself didn’t know that the posters hadn’t been produced to meet the demand of some upwelling of sports fever in Iraq, but had been manufactured by a U.S. PsyOps team.