Success Has A Thousand Fathers, Failure Just Has These Bastards

Having grown bored of dead Iraqis and American soldiers, various neocon guttersnipers have now morphed into a circular firing squad.

Here's Ahmed Chalabi, from the summary of an interview published in the Iraq National Congress' house organ:

What about the WMD propaganda? Chalabi counters views that he was the catalyst, saying that it was Bush officials who "came to us and asked, 'Can you help us find something on Saddam?'"

Sounds like a rhetorical question.

[Chalabi] also claims that he warned the Bush people that various Iraqi informants were unreliable, only to hear the Americans say, referring to the source, "This guy is the mother lode." Chalabi, of all people asks, "Can you believe that on such a basis the United States would go to war?"

Why, if we planted it in the New York Times, it must be true.

Meanwhile, in the forthcoming Vanity Fair, various gasbags of the quagmire insist the flatuence originated elsewhere.

Richard Perle says he was only a cheerleader, not the quarterback.

"I was in favor of bringing down Saddam. Nobody said, 'Go design the campaign to do that.' I had no responsibility for that."

David Frum admits The Right Man was a fraud of Conrad Blackian proportions (let them share the same cell):

"I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words. And the big shock to me has been that although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas. And that is the root of, maybe, everything."

We'll put David down in the "stupid" column.

Meanwhile, Michael Ledeen blames the bitches:

"Ask yourself who the most powerful people in the White House are. They are women who are in love with the president: Laura [Bush], Condi, Harriet Miers, and Karen Hughes."

Iraq is a debacle 'cause Bush is pussywhipped. (If only he'd listened to Dick Cheney and Karl Rove!) Spoken like a true Pajamas Median.

Meanwhile, Vanity Fair's own colonialist, Chris Hitchens, was unavailable for consciousness.

Things To Do in Denver When You're Ted

Now it can be revealed! Ted "Art" Haggard is a victim of the War Against Christmas:

The Rev. Ted Haggard denied the allegation that the two men met for sex as often as every month for the last three years. But he did say that he had gone to the prostitute's Denver apartment for a massage and later called him more than once to buy meth -- a drug thought to heighten sexual sensation.

...

The man Haggard met in Denver, Mike Jones, has advertised as a male escort in gay magazines. His website promises massages "with the pleasure of the man in mind" and includes photos of his bodybuilder physique -- including one where he's nude except for a Santa hat. Haggard said he was referred to Jones for a massage by a Denver hotel.

Ho! Ho! Ho!

But unlike Ted, Christmas comes only once a year.

Update: CNN and others report that the "board of overseers" at Father Ted's parish have let the door hit Ted on the ass on his way out. Apparently, they either think Ted's been lying to them, or they think getting a massage is sex. This is Father Dougal Parsley's big break.

Moral Haggard, Or, Notes On Jesus Camp

What is it with these movie stars and their decadent lifestyles?

Levi, Rachel and Tory are seen [in the movie Jesus Camp] at home, a bowling alley, going to camp and then crisscrossing the country from an Evangelical church headed by Ted Haggard in Colorado Springs, Colo., to praying outside a Kansas abortion clinic and finally protesting abortion with red tape with "life" written on it over their mouths, as they pray outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C.

...

In the documentary, Haggard, who heads the National Association of Evangelicals, brags that children are fueling a boom in his churches and that evangelicals would hold a lot of control in U.S. politics.

Evangelical Christians are estimated to number 75 million in the United States. It's estimated 25 million Evangelicals voted in the 2004 presidential election with 80 percent voting Republican.

"There's a new church like this every two days," Haggard boasts in "Jesus Camp." "It's got enough growth to essentially sway every election. If the Evangelicals vote, they determine the election."

Unless they're too busy banging escorts, that is.

Late Breaking News: Haggard has "confessed" something to "Big Rod" Parsley, while James Dobson, Focus on the Family's Top, remains the queen of denial.

Bobby Burchfield, Enemy of the First Amendment

By now, you've probably read that incumbent Rep. Don Sherwood (R-PA) paid Cynthia Ore half a million dollars for not strangling her.

Hardly a fiscal conservative. Or a tort reformer.

A Republican congressman accused of abusing his ex-mistress agreed to pay her about $500,000 in a settlement last year that contained a powerful incentive for her to keep quiet until after Election Day, a person familiar with the terms of the deal told The Associated Press.

Rep. Don Sherwood is locked in a tight re-election race against a Democratic opponent who has seized on the four-term congressman's relationship with the woman. While Sherwood acknowledged the woman was his mistress, he denied abusing her and said that he had settled her $5.5 million lawsuit on confidential terms.

The settlement, reached in November 2005, called for Cynthia Ore to be paid in installments, according to a person who spoke on condition of anonymity because the deal is confidential. She has received less than half the money so far, and will not get the rest until after the Nov. 7 election, the person said Thursday.

More interesting than the typical Republican lo-lifery of Sherwood is the work of his shyster:

Even before Ore settled, the congressman tried to keep a tight lid on the case. His lawyer asked a judge to prohibit disclosure of materials from the case, warning that Sherwood's opponents might try to use the information to harm him politically.

The lawyer, Bobby Burchfield, was especially adamant that any videotaped deposition of Sherwood not be released, saying the footage could be used against him in negative political ads.

Yes, Bobby Burchfield, the same high-billing hack who spouted platitudes in The Weekly Standard about how free speech in political campaigns is "the oxygen of democracy." Seems Bobby has the same grasp on democracy that Representative Sherwood had on Ms. Ore's windpipe.

The Shame of Berkeley

In the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani paints accurate portrait of John "Screw" Yoo, the intellectual lightweight who sits, steaming, on the seat cushion of the Edwin Meese Chair for Unconsitutional Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, Boalt Hall School of Law:

One of his favorite tactics in this book is to create a ridiculous caricature of administration critics' views and then dismiss them. For instance, he writes: "A Geneva Convention POW camp is supposed to look like the World War II camps seen in movies like 'Stalag 17' or 'The Great Escape.' But because Gitmo does not look like this, critics automatically declare that detainees' human rights are being violated."

Uh, that's Ronnie Reagan who confused World War II camps with the movies, not the Administration's critics.

Instead, he has written a book that reads like a combination of White House talking points and a partisan brief on presidential prerogatives -- a book that is strewn with preposterous assertions, contorted reasoning and illogical conclusions. He writes that "because of our aggressive policies post 9/11, al Qaeda is no longer the threat it was." He suggests that might makes right: "At this moment in world history the United States' conduct should bear the most weight in defining the customs of war. Our defense budget is greater than the defense spending of the next fifteen nations combined."

And that's been working so well, too.

Maybe Berkeley can save its next professorships for Mark Levin and Larry Klayman.