First, Hillary Clinton excoriates Bush for allowing an American company to be sold and the jobs shipped overseas:

Hillary Clinton loves to tell the story about how the Chinese government bought a good American company in Indiana, laid off all its workers and moved its critical defense technology work to China.

It’s a story with a dramatic, political ending. Republican President George W. Bush could have stopped it, but he didn’t.

If she were president, Clinton says, she’d fight to protect those jobs. It’s just the kind of talk that’s helping her win support from working-class Democrats worried about their jobs and paychecks, not to mention their country’s security.

What Clinton never includes in the oft-repeated tale is the role that prominent Democrats played in selling the company and its technology to the Chinese. She never mentions that big-time Democratic contributor George Soros helped put together the deal to sell the company or that the sale was approved by her husband’s administration.

Second, an appearance on FoxNews’s The O’Reilly Factor with the unctuous fallalfel-waving Bill-O to denounce Barrack Obama via the popular surrogate of Flogging Jeremiah Wright:

Hillary Rodham Clinton said Wednesday she found remarks by Barack Obama’s former pastor to be “offensive and outrageous” and noted that her Democratic rival had spoken out forcefully against them.

“I think that he made his views clear, finally, that he disagreed. And I think that’s what he had to do,” Clinton said in an interview with Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly. The network released excerpts of the taped interview ahead of its airing Wednesday night.

It was the former first lady’s first appearance on the O’Reilly show, the most popular Fox News program and a staple of conservative media. Over the years, O’Reilly has been a staunch critic of both the New York senator and her husband, former President Bill Clinton.

Campaign aides said her appearance on the Fox News show was designed to reach out to working-class, independent white men who could decide the outcome of next week’s Indiana primary.

You can watch the video here.

Glenn Greenwald writes about the “response” of NBC anchor Williams to disclosure that supposedly independent analysts employed by the network were part of a Pentagon “PsyOps” effort targeting the American people, in order to pimp the Iraq war.

At no time did our analysts, on my watch or to my knowledge, attempt to push a rosy Pentagon agenda before our viewers. I think they are better men than that, and I believe our news division is better than that.

Our “liberal media” at work.

It’s completely out of character for this blog to post something nice, something touching.

I’ll probably get ridiculed at the next editorial staff meeting. (Note to Alex and Donna: When is the next editorial staff meeting?)

But I liked this story enough to risk their chastisement. From George Vecsey of the New York Times:

The moment of grace came after Sara Tucholsky, a diminutive senior for Western Oregon, hit what looked like a three-run homer against Central Washington. Never in her 21 years had Tucholsky propelled a ball over a fence, so she did not have her home run trot in order, gazing in awe, missing first base. When she turned back to touch the bag, her right knee buckled, and she went down, crying and crawling back to first base.

Pam Knox, the Western Oregon coach, made sure no teammates touched Tucholsky, which would have automatically made her unable to advance. The umpires ruled that if Tucholsky could not make it around the bases, two runs would score but she would be credited with only a single. (“She’ll kill me if I take it away from her,” Knox thought.)

Then Mallory Holtman, the powerful first baseman for Central Washington, said words that brought a chill to everybody who heard them:

“Excuse me, would it be O.K. if we carried her around and she touched each bag?”

So, as Vecsey tells it, they did.

I’ve watched like a million games over the years, coached about half of them, it seems. I’ve never seen something quite like what took place up in Washington. I’ve seen plenty of the opposite, I’ve seen 10 year olds with sharpened metal cleats spike my shortstop. I’ve seen linebackers pound my 11 year old quarterback after the play, trying to knock him out. And not a weekend goes by where I don’t see kids running up the score on my current team — which is in last place.

The question is, where did it come from, this impulsive gesture by Mallory Holtman?

“She hit it over the fence,” Holtman said Tuesday. “She deserved it. Anybody would have done it. I just beat them to it.” She said she had been taught by her coach, Gary Frederick, that “winning is not everything.”

Fuming over a perceived lack of objectivity infused in the universally horrible reviews of Douglas (”the stupidest fucking guy on the Planet”) Feith’s book War and Decision by independent journalists, not-Assrocket of the Powerline blog offers what he believes is a more pristine and unbiased review from — get this — Douglas (”the stupidest fucking guy on the Planet”) Feith:

The Washington Post has run two hatchet jobs on the book. Thomas Ricks and Karen DeYoung looked through the book for newsworthy items they were able to find in the few hours after they obtained a leaked copy of the not-fully-edited typescript in which to glance at the book and interview Feith and Paul Bremer. A cynic might accuse them of “cherry-picking” the book to suit an agenda. The Ricks/DeYoung article elicited a brief response from the book’s publisher.

Dana Milbank attended the CSIS discussion of the book last Thursday. It’s clear from his article that Milbank hasn’t cracked the book open. That will have to do for readers of the Post, which has advised Mr. Feith that no review of the book is forthcoming in their pages because Ricks and DeYoung have already written about it.

We invited Mr. Feith to preview the book in his own words for our readers. He has graciously responded.

Naturally, what follows is mostly a monumental pile of bullshit from Feith contradicting years of reports and mountains sworn testimony from officials before Congress about the lack of planning for post-invasion Iraq. Accompanied by some kind words by not-Assrocket about the author of the book yet another critic called a “Creepy Polemic” intended to rationalize the Iraq War:

As the former U.S. undersecretary of defense for policy, Feith was “inside the Pentagon at the dawn of the war on terrorism,” as the subtitle says. His book is billed as the first insider’s account of the decisions taken just after Sept. 11, 2001, and how they resulted in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

How candid is he? Put it this way: If Feith told me it was raining, I’d step outside and get wet before believing him.

From start to finish, this book seeks to revise what the author calls “the now-standard story” that depicts President George W. Bush and his advisers “as militaristic and reckless, closed-minded and ideological, thoughtless at best and even dishonest — and hell-bent on war with Iraq from the Administration’s inception.”

Like the president he served, Feith is arrogantly unwilling to question the wisdom of what the Bush administration has done. There’s no action, no matter how disastrous the consequence, that he isn’t prepared to defend.

We’d expect no less from the pack of clueless assholes who once opined that President Bush was “A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius” and waxed enthusiastically about the excellence of Michael “Brownie” Brown’s disastrous and pathetic appearance before a House subcommittee investigating Brown’s even more disastrous performance as head of FEMA responding to Katrina, explaining that, after all, “Michael Brown didn’t flood New Orleans” and so attempts to hold him accountable for FEMA’s response were absurd. For a witless group which can fluff Bush’s intellect and Brownie’s competence, clearly fluffing Feith’s veracity and integrity poses little challenge.

I’m pretty sure he hates sodding wankers:

Breaking his silence on the topic, the former British prime minister says his belief in God has been an essential backdrop in his public life.

~~~

Yet it has become clear over the last year or so that religion permeated many aspects of Blair’s work in government. Last year, Blair told ITV1 that he had prayed while making his decision on committing British forces to Iraq.

“In the end, there is a judgment that, I think if you have faith about these things, you realize that judgment is made by other people . . . and if you believe in God, it’s made by God as well,” he said.

So God-fueled decision making underlay the decision on both sides of the Atlantic to launch the invasion of Iraq, resulting in the “major debacle” with which we currently have to contend.

Dumb all over.

Assuming, of course, Wright was actually running for office, other than in the fetid minds of corporate media and Wingnut bloggers.

Five years after Bush invaded Iraq with the intention of installing Ahmed Chalabi as his satrap, McClatchy’s Washington Bureau poses the question: Is an Iranian general the most powerful man in Iraq?

One of the most powerful men in Iraq isn’t an Iraqi government official, a militia leader, a senior cleric or a top U.S. military commander or diplomat,

He’s an Iranian general, and at times he’s more influential than all of them.

Brig. Gen. Qassem Suleimani commands the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force, an elite paramilitary and espionage organization whose mission is to expand Iran’s influence in the Middle East.

~~~

Suleimani’s role in Iraq illustrates how President Bush’s decision to topple Saddam has enabled Shiite, Persian Iran to extend its influence in Iraq, frustrating U.S, aims there, alarming America’s Sunni Arab allies in the Persian Gulf and prompting new Israeli fears about Iran’s ambitions.

~~~

In Iraq, Iran’s chief ally has been the Badr Organization, formerly the paramilitary wing of what’s now the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, the country’s largest Shiite political party. During the Iran-Iraq war, Badr operated as a wing of the Iranian military; after the toppling of Saddam, Badr members infiltrated the security forces and were believed to be responsible for torturing and killing jailed Sunnis.

~~~

One of Suleimani’s first major victories against the United States in Iraq, however, was the product of political shrewdness, not military force. It came in January 2005, when Iraqis voted for the first time since Saddam’s ouster nearly two years earlier.

The Bush administration pulled out all the stops to keep secular, pro-Western interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi in office, aiding him with broadcast airtime, slick campaign ads and veteran advisers.

Suleimani countered with a covert PR campaign on behalf of a bloc of conservative pro-Iran Shiites that he helped assemble, and he sent printing presses, consultants and broadcasting equipment, said a senior Iraqi official who’s known Suleimani for years. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive relationship between Iraq and Iran.

When the ballots were counted, Bush pointed to the purple-dyed fingers of Iraqi voters as a triumph for democracy — but Allawi and his bloc were out and Iran’s allies were in.

Allawi was the administration’s choice to replace Chalabi as their choice to run Iraq — until he was badly defeated in elections which brought the pro-Iranian D’awa and ISCI political groups to power, along with Sadr’s political organization.

And while the administration continues to push a storyline which places Sadr and Iran on the side of evil and the government of Nouri al Maliki and his allies on our side of good, not only are is the Badr organization affiliated with Maliki’s government among Iran’s closest allies (having fought as part of the Iranian military) al Maliki’s own ascendence may have been the result of General Suleimani’s mediation between competing Iraqi Shiite factions, all of which Iran may own a piece.

Bush has effectively disintegrated the cornerstone principles of American foreign policy in the Persian Gulf. Prior to 1979, the US relied on Iran to act as regional policeman and counterbalance Iraq and socialist arab regimes perceived to be Soviet client states in the region.

After the fall of the Shah and the ascendance of Islamic radicals in Tehran, we shifted support to Iraq, intervening to keep the Straights of Hormuz open and Iraqi oil flowing to market. In both instances, Iraq and Iran were a counterbalance against the other.

In the wake of our invasion, and the progressive disintegration of Iraq as a country into sectarian and ethnic components, Iran now stands to remain a dominant player in the politics of the Shiite majority; Iran’s regional enemy has not only been destroyed, the majority of its people and resources are poised to become its most substantial ally.

Tom Hayden, writing in The Nation:

. . . as the Obama campaign gained momentum, Hillary began morphing into the persona that has my pacifist wife screaming at the television set.

Going negative doesn’t begin to describe what has happened. Hillary is going over the edge. Even worse are the flacks she sends before the cameras on her behalf, like that Kiki person, who smirks and shakes her head at the camera every time she fields a question. Or the real carnivores, like Howard Wolfson, Lanny Davis and James Carville, whose sneering smugness prevents countless women like my wife from considering Hillary at all.

~~~

To take just one example, the imagined association between Barack Obama and Bill Ayers will suffice. Hillary is blind to her own roots in the sixties. In one college speech she spoke of ecstatic transcendence; in another, she said, “Our social indictment has broadened. Where once we exposed the quality of life in the world of the South and the ghettos, now we condemn the quality of work in factories and corporations. Where once we assaulted the exploitation of man, now we decry the destruction of nature as well. How much long can we let corporations run us?”

She was in Chicago for three nights during the 1968 street confrontations. She chaired the 1970 Yale law school meeting where students voted to join a national student strike again an “unconscionable expansion of a war that should never have been waged.” She was involved in the New Haven defense of Bobby Seale during his murder trial in 1970, as the lead scheduler of student monitors. She surely agreed with Yale president Kingman Brewster that a black revolutionary couldn’t get a fair trial in America. She wrote that abused children were citizens with the same rights as their parents.

Most significantly in terms of her recent attacks on Barack, after Yale law school, Hillary went to work for the left-wing Bay Area law firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, which specialized in Black Panthers and West Coast labor leaders prosecuted for being communists. Two of the firm’s partners, according to Treuhaft, were communists and the two others “tolerated communists”. Then she went on to Washington to help impeach Richard Nixon, whose career was built on smearing and destroying the careers of people through vague insinuations about their backgrounds and associates. (All these citations can be found in Carl Bernstein’s sympathetic 2007 Clinton biography, A Woman in Charge.)

All these were honorable words and associations in my mind, but doesn’t she see how the Hillary of today would accuse the Hillary of the sixties of associating with black revolutionaries who fought gun battles with police officers, and defending pro-communist lawyers who backed communists? Doesn’t the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whom Hillary attacks today, represent the very essence of the black radicals Hillary was associating with in those days? And isn’t the Hillary of today becoming the same kind of guilt-by-association insinuator as the Richard Nixon she worked to impeach?

It is as if Hillary Clinton is engaged in a toxic transmission onto Barack Obama of every outrageous insult and accusation ever inflicted on her by the American right over the decades. She is running against what she might have become. Too much politics dries the soul of the idealist.

~~~

Since no one in the party leadership seems able or willing to intervene against this self-destructive downward spiral, perhaps progressives need to consider responding in the only way politicians sometimes understand. If they can’t hear us screaming at the television sets, we can send a message that the Clintons are acting as if they prefer John McCain to Barack Obama. And follow it up with another message: if Clinton doesn’t immediately cease her path of destruction, millions of young voters and black voters may not send checks, may not knock on doors, and may not even vote for her if she becomes the nominee. That’s not a threat, that’s the reality she is creating.

So it’s the Mahdi Army and their Iranian backers causing all that violence in Iraq, says the Army:

Nearly three-quarters of the attacks that kill or wound American soldiers in Baghdad are carried out by Iranian-backed Shiite groups, the United States military said Wednesday.

Senior officers in the American division that secures the capital said that 73 percent of fatal and other harmful attacks on American troops in the past year were caused by roadside bombs planted by so-called “special groups.”

The American military uses that term to describe groups trained by Iran that fight alongside the Mahdi Army but do not obey the orders of the militia’s figurehead, the cleric Moktada al-Sadr, to observe a cease-fire. But Col. Allen Batschelet, the Baghdad division’s chief of staff, conceded that there was overlap between the groups.

“These two groups are so amorphous; they go back and forth between one another,” the colonel said at a briefing in Baghdad.

“We see evidence of a guy who might be working very hard inside Jaish al-Mahdi to present himself as a mainstream, kind of compliant person,” he said, using the Arabic name for the Mahdi Army, “yet we have other indicators that will show him kind of working the night job doing special group, criminal kind of stuff.”

And yet:

Iran’s foreign minister, Manuchehr Mottaki, strongly backed Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s attack on the Mahdi Army militia on Wednesday. He said, “Weapons should be only in the hands of the Iraqi army.” The Iraqi army appears increasingly to be dominated by cadres of the Badr Corps paramilitary of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, headed by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim. The Badr Corps was trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, and it and ISCI are key Iranian clients in Iraq. What Mottaki said therefore makes complete sense. What doesn’t make sense is the Bush administration’s long-term effort to misrepresent the nativist Sadr Movement and its Mahdi Army, based in Iraq’s festering slums, as Iran-backed.

Meanwhile, General Petraeus, who in testimony to Congress blamed Iranian special forces for directing Mahdi Army attacks in Iraq has been slotted to replace Admiral Fallon, who reportedly was hostile to the administration’s interest in attacking Iran, as commander of CENTCOM, the military command responsible for military action in the Middle East theater of operations which includes both Iraq and Iran.

Tim, from Balloon Juice adds:

I bet those nefarious Iranian agents are in the east, west, south and north of Baghdad.

Wait, no they’re not. The string-pulling Persians are sitting in the Green Zone lunching comfortably with the Iraqi Prime Minister, whose Badr-allied security forces they control more than he does. After the Basra crackdown Iran sided decisively with Nouri al-Maliki and against Muqtada al-Sadr. It’s Sadr, the nationalist partisan of Iraq’s internal debate over Iranian influence vs. home rule, who has a wide lead in American casualties. Calling Sadr the Iranian stooge is like denouncing the Democratic party for supporting torture.

For all this blathering about Iranian influence in Iraq, are these people really so dumb that they can’t figure out the key figures in Iraqi government we are supporting spent a decade or more in Iran, as special guests of the mullahs?