Potemkin Lite

And with less gravitas--Frank Rich has more:

Mr. Bush's "Plan for Victory" speech was, of course, the usual unadulterated nonsense. Its overarching theme - "We will never accept anything less than complete victory" - was being contradicted even as he spoke by rampant reports of Pentagon plans for stepped-up troop withdrawals between next week's Iraqi elections and the more important (for endangered Republicans) American Election Day of 2006. The specifics were phony, too: Once again inflating the readiness of Iraqi troops, Mr. Bush claimed that the recent assault on Tal Afar "was primarily led by Iraqi security forces" - a fairy tale immediately unmasked by Michael Ware, a Time reporter embedded in that battle's front lines, as "completely wrong." No less an authority than the office of Iraq's prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, promptly released a 59-page report documenting his own military's inadequate leadership, equipment and training.

Note, by the way, today's NY Times article pointing out the dauphin himself is lowering expectations in Iraq, probably to about the level Herr Kissinger went public with a year or so ago: basically, Saddam, just minus Saddam himself. Can't say I didn't see that from light-years away...of course, given the level of ineptitude with Team Bush, that "goal" is hanging by a thread--it's far more likely we'll see Iraq the Theocracy, thanks to their handiwork...

Anyway, Rich, after taking some time to note another nutjob program from the team, that is, throwing literally obscene amounts of money at organizations like The Lincoln Group for not particularly good propaganda (not to mention the fact that sweetheart deals like this make a mockery of the notion of self-reliance: is that the BEST these clowns can do? Suck up public money like a vacuum cleaner?)--anyway, Rich, as others are beginning to note too, contrasts the global with the local--as I've said previously, if this government can't clean up the Gulf Coast, which has the advantage of being IN the United States and, believe it or not, is decidedly less violent than Iraq--if the government can't clean up our region, how in hell can anyone believe ANY of their bloviating about what they promise to accomplish overseas?

The more we learn about such sleaze in the propaganda war, the more we see it's failing for the same reason as the real war: incompetence. Much as the disastrous Bremer regime botched the occupation of Iraq with bad decisions made by its array of administration cronies and relatives (among them Ari Fleischer's brother), so the White House doesn't exactly get the biggest bang for the bucks it shells out to cronies for fake news.

Until he was unmasked as an administration shill, Armstrong Williams was less known for journalism than for striking a deal to dismiss a messy sexual-harassment suit against him in 1999. When an Army commander had troops sign 500 identical good-news form letters to local newspapers throughout America in 2003, the fraud was so transparent it was almost instantly debunked. The fictional scenarios concocted for Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman also unraveled quickly, as did last weekend's Pentagon account of 10 marines killed outside Falluja on a "routine foot patrol." As the NBC correspondent Jim Miklaszewski told Don Imus last week, he received calls within hours from the fallen's loved ones about how the marines had been slaughtered after being recklessly sent to an unprotected site for a promotion ceremony.

Though the White House doesn't know that its jig is up, everyone else does. Americans see that New Orleans is in as sorry shape today as it was under Brownie three months ago. The bipartisan 9/11 commissioners confirm that homeland security remains a pork pit. Condi Rice's daily clarifications of her clarifications about American torture policies are contradicted by new reports of horrors before her latest circumlocutions leave her mouth. And the president's latest Iraq speeches - most recently about the "success" stories of Najaf and Mosul - still don't stand up to the most rudimentary fact checking.

The jig is up--not a bad slogan for 2006.