Items of interest

(1) Peter Daou identifies a serious problem – namely, that there are so many Bush scandals and so many tales of corruption, that none really get the attention they deserve, and they therefore all end up blurring into one another and resulting in basically nothing. The solution, as Peter points out, is for one or two of them (such as the NSA scandal, where Bush plainly broke the law and over which members of his own party are starting to revolt), but the real impediment for Bush opponents is that there is little coordination and they so often are working at cross-purposes that even the most devastating scandals end up having little or no impact.

(2) Tony at MTanga has a revealing and quite hilarious analysis of what George Bush means when he constantly refers to his “duties”.

(3) Both The Heretik and Jeralyn at Talk Left have important posts examining the new, disgraceful revelations that virtually everything the Administration has said about the detainees at Guantanamo has been false. All but a very small minority of detainees had nothing to do with Al Qaeda, and even among the ones who fought with the Taliban or Al Qaeda, most were low-level foot soldiers with no intelligence value.

There are genuine and substantial threats posed by Muslim extremism. But nobody has done more to prevent meaningful action being taken against these threats than has the Bush Administration, whose pronouncements on these topics have been uniformly false, and whose only real interest in terrorism appears to be the extent to which they can manipulate it for domestic political gain. If a government continuously issues false statements about its terrorist policies and plays transparent games with that threat for partisan advantage, it is not difficult to foresee that large numbers of people will cease to take seriously the government’s alarmist warnings.

--posted by Glenn Greenwald

(Added): Atrios on Stuart Taylor and Gitmo