todolist.jpg(Graphic via Brilliant At Breakfast.  Good one!)

The President and his cadre of neoconmen just got caught in a hefty whopper.

In an interview with Robert Draper, author of the new book, “Dead Certain,” Mr. Bush sounded as if he had been taken aback by the decision, or at least by the need to abandon the original plan to keep the army together.

“The policy had been to keep the army intact; didn’t happen,” Mr. Bush told the interviewer. When Mr. Draper asked the president how he had reacted when he learned that the policy was being reversed, Mr. Bush replied, “Yeah, I can’t remember, I’m sure I said, “This is the policy, what happened?’ ”

Mr. Bremer indicated that he had been smoldering for months as other administration officials had distanced themselves from his order. “This didn’t just pop out of my head,” he said in a telephone interview on Monday, adding that he had sent a draft of the order to top Pentagon officials and discussed it “several times” with Mr. Rumsfeld.

So much for the "blame Bremer" gambit.  (Cue the swiftboats...)  But who needs truth when you can try and manufacture your own reality, right?  As Glenn says:

Or, put another way, Sowell -- like most of the Bush-following movement -- believes Libby to be innocent even after he was proven guilty. My favorite example, from right-wing talk radio host, National Review contributor, and rule-of-law tough guy Mark Levin: "The way I see it, Lewis Libby was about to become a political prisoner and the president prevented that."...

...those whose primary allegiance is to authority figures and whose identity is centrally grounded in their authority-based political movement have, as their overarching goal, a defense of their movement and attacks on the enemy. Holding blatantly contradictory thoughts at the same time, like the ones expressed here by Sowell, become normalized -- mere tools for achieving the only goal that matters.

Convenient how those little things called "facts" and "history" can be blithely swept aside, isn't it?  Each and every time there is no public accountability for this fact-free swill and directly contradictory statements, they push the boundaries of idiocy a bit further.  Every time the press allows them to get away with it, rather than raising the obvious follow-up questions of factual inaccuracy?  They are further emboldened to keep on lying.  And until they are publicly and consistently called on the lies?  The bulk of the public who do not bother to go fact-checking between carpools and soccer practice drop-offs and such will never, ever know the depth of their craven public farce.

The fact that the national press corps is now referring to the "yes people" -- who sit at the President's feet and vociforously debate and disagree in private (HA!) only to parrot talking points in public -- as "the war cabinet" makes me nauseous.  They are laughing at the entire nation, and daring someone to call them on it. 

But it is all crumbling beneath them as all these good neoconmen scramble to reconstitute their reputations from the ashes of failure.  Let the finger-pointing begin.  And, in the meantime, Iraq is a mess and Afghanistan is getting worse, and that's just for starters.

Welcome to government by ends justifies any means necessary -- except we never, ever reach the ends, we just get put on hold until President Short Attention Span moves onto the next causus interruptus.  Time to call his bluff -- publicly and immediately -- just like Bremer did.  Demand accountability.  Now.

(PS:  Today is The Peanut's first day of preschool, and she's old enough to ride the bus.  You're never quite prepared for that feeling as they drive away, are you?  My little one is getting big.  *sniffle*)