Spin Cycle

Twisting into the ground.

The Shrub Traveling Clown Road Show continues today with an appearance in West Virginia--maybe Rove thinks the good people there still lack things like television: the speech and subsequent Q&A could be the picture next to a definition of "phone it in."

Some are already beginning to speculate as to the mental health of Shrubusto...and I for one would hate to get in between the village idiot and a tall glass of Jim Beam.

But while Smirk-Chimp waxes on in his personal Neverland, his spin has collided head on with a wringer called reality:

Insurgents attacked the mayor's office and police station in a town south of the Iraqi capital early Wednesday, killing three police officers and a police commando, police sources said.

Insurgents pounded the facilities in Madain with coordinated mortar and small-arms fire, sources said.
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Hundreds of militants stormed a jail in a pre-dawn raid to free inmates yesterday in the Sunni heartland north of Baghdad, triggering the deadliest firefight this year, which left 20 police and 10 insurgents dead.Authorities said all 33 prisoners in the lockup were freed.

Link--courtesy of Juan Cole.
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Here's the "good" news:

Insurgents attacked a police station Wednesday for a second day in a row, but U.S. and Iraqi forces captured 50 of them after a two-hour gunbattle.

A two-hour gunbattle and a daylight raid on a jail can hardly be spun into "last throes," Mr. Cheney.
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Then you've got the head of the FBI's counterterrorism division admitting in open court that he never bothered to read a memo from the Minneapolis field office...speculating that Zacarias Moussaoui might be plotting a terrorist attack using airplanes. The memo was dated August 18, 2001 (note: Maureen Dowd--sorry, no link--cites agent Greg Jones as the person who guessed the target might be...the World Trade Center)...

On August 18, 2001, George W. Bush was setting an example for his administration...by continuing his vacation (he remained on vacation until the first week of September).
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There's yet more embarrassing revelations and fallout from the Abu Ghraib scandal, The New Afghanistan™ is showing some not-so-new trends, Hugo Chavez is enjoying a laugh at our expense...but hey, Halliburton's up by over a point, so I guess Cheney's not too upset.