Public bend over, the next round of big lies are coming

We've been told, repeatedly, though not consistently, by everyone in Washington that we just need to wait until September to finally learn the reality in Iraq, and then debate the way forward.

This is a huge and obvious dodge which has been readily embraced by officials of both parties.

First, Bush and the White House announced, and Republicans and spineless Dems all quickly embraced, the line that the heroic Gen. Petraeus was going to give the holy grail in September. Remember? This was their shield against anyone trying to actually come up with a plan for Iraq, and effectively halted all calls for and debate on a way to end the madness there.

Dems and Republicans alike leapt at the chance to be able to put off making any judgements or hard decisions on the matter, and gladly let the "surge" make it's increasingly bloody and by all objective accounts, ineffective course.

Bush said over and over again that he was relying on the vaunted General to make all the decisions and report back on how Bush's escalation was working.

A few weeks ago though, it was leaked that the General Petraeus report .... wasn't going to be written by Gen. Petraeus, but rather written and twisted by the White House and put out under his name, effectively making Petreus nothing but a mouthpiece... another sad repeat of a somewhat honorable man willingly throwing away his integrity to aid the White House effort to continue the war like they did to Colin Powell when they set him up to destroy his substantial credibility by delivering the false report at the U.N.

Bait and switch. A favorite and oft-used tactic of a White House for whom honesty is for suckers and to whom their political fortunes far outweigh the further loss of American lives in Iraq.

A full scale sales campaign in in full swing to sell (con) the public into thinking this Iraq business is .... amazingly and against all rational and verifiable evidence... really going well. Imagine that.

Former Bush press flack Ari Fliesher is heading a group funded to the tune of millions to run ads where images of the WTC falling is conflated once again with the doomed effort in Iraq, right wing flacks are taken to Iraq and given completely stage managed "tours", and then come back to make the press rounds reporting about how they "were there" and saw incredible progress on their pentagon scripted tours.

The hard evidence that little to no progress is being made is swept under the rug, such as the Government Accountibility Office (GAO) report which said there was no evidence of any improvement.

Some sugest this report was leaked to get the facts out before the White House ordered it altered to suit it's political goals, as it has done to independent government reports in the past.

It also ignores reportsfrom active duty soldiers, who were so insulted by the rosy reports of progress by administration shills that a group of them took the unprecidented step of collectively writing a rebuttal to them in an editorial in the New York Times which provided a boots on the ground view of the increased violence, death, and danger to our troops there, as well as the lack of any progress whatsoever in achieving even a marginally stable situation.

Now, after months of build-up, after Bush has dodged the issue for months as hundreds more Americans were killed and maimed in Iraq as politicians sat largely muzzled waiting for this definitive report, we learn that there won't be any actual Petraeus report at all!

Nope, (try to believe this) it's been learned that they've decided that there will be no written report whatsoever. Beyond Petraeus' written opening statement for his testimony before congress and some charts he may use, there will be nothing, no "report" at all. Nothing in writing for this President to study on such a crucial and monumental decision. He'll just talk with Petreaus for a while, that's good enough for him. It's doubtful he could manage to get though anything longer than a memo anyway, I suppose.

So after throwing water on any debate for months by pointing to this monumental report which would be delivered in September, now that it's days from being delievered, we're told there'll be nothing for the historical record, nothing for the pentagon or the public to review, nothing on paper at all.

Let's review.

First Bush repeatedly side-steps any discussion of strategy in Iraq and kicks the can down the road by saying he can't and won't make any decisions until Petraus, a general which he repeatedly seemed to be handing over the entire war to, issued a comprehensive report on the effectiveness of Bush's surge.

Then as the date nears, it's revealed that Petraeus won't be the author of his own report. The White House will bastardize it for their own purposes and then hide behind and use (abuse) Petraeus' credibility for their own purposes, just like they did Powell.

We learn that there will be no report in the traditional sense at all. It's vapor. Nothing.

Then there's the issue of how the pentagon and White House are twisting the statistics to give a misleading impression that there is great progress in Iraq.
They simply decided to not include mass killings from bombings which often produce, including recently, hundreds of deaths at a time. They've also come up with a convenient way to not count most of the violence and death by not counting the huge number of murders committed by one sect against members of their own sect. (as if that's easy to determine.) The fact is, the data is phoney.

As Paul Krugman notes in the New York Times:

Apparently, the Pentagon has a double super secret formula that it uses to distinguish sectarian killings (bad) from other deaths (not important); according to press reports, all deaths from car bombs are excluded, and one intelligence analyst told The Washington Post that “if a bullet went through the back of the head, it’s sectarian. If it went through the front, it’s criminal.” So the number of dead is down, as long as you only count certain kinds of dead people.

Oh, and by the way: Baghdad is undergoing ethnic cleansing, with Shiite militias driving Sunnis out of much of the city. And guess what? When a Sunni enclave is eliminated and the death toll in that district falls because there’s nobody left to kill, that counts as progress by the Pentagon’s metric.

If you're feeling like an abused spouse who is constantly lied to and disrespected by the Bush gang, and can see another one coming, you're justified.

But when it's shown that someone has told you bald-faced lies over and over and over again, at some point, it's your fault for continuing to believe them.

Now if the Dems could get out of their shivering crouch and stop letting the Republican aggressors define them, stop being cowards and stand up to the effort to portray them as "weak on defense" or somehow "not supporting the troops" when they're trying to get them out of a misguided and bloody mistake. If they could stop acting like abused spouses who continually enable and cave in to their more strident and manipulative Republican abusers, perhaps the country could make some progress in the messy and unpleasant business of trying to minimize the damage resulting from the disaster Bush has led it into.