HAIL, FREEDONIA

From abroad, the madness in the US media over the verity of documents detailing Dubya's de facto desertion during wartime appears to have sprung straight from the mind of Groucho ("So what if I'm a deserter? These love letters are a pack of lies!"), with Rather and CBS being crucified by the far-righteous, whose Fuzzy Fox, Wily Limbaugh et al., not to mention the Rove Sewage Squad, get away with strangling America's founding legacy.

All this noise and clamor is nothing more than misdirection of course, drawing the electorate's gaze away from what's really going on (tv, the great zombifier, is an excellent suppressor of skepticism and discernment), casting a pall of artificial smoke over the real and deepening travesty that is Iraq, a lengthening lie being drilled into the US electorate as a key component of the essential "war on terror" when in fact it's all about oil and hasn't laid a hand on terror, as is plain to the Iraqi people, over 12,000 men women and children of whom have died thus far in liberation.

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"FAR GRAVER THAN VIETNAM

Most senior US military officers now believe the war on Iraq has turned into a disaster on an unprecedented scale

Sidney Blumenthal

'Bring them on!' President Bush challenged the early Iraqi insurgency in July of last year. Since then, 812 American soldiers have been killed and 6,290 wounded, according to the Pentagon. Almost every day, in campaign speeches, Bush speaks with bravado about how he is 'winning' in Iraq. 'Our strategy is succeeding,' he boasted to the National Guard convention on Tuesday.

But, according to the US military's leading strategists and prominent retired generals, Bush's war is already lost. Retired general William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency, told me: 'Bush hasn't found the WMD. Al-Qaida, it's worse, he's lost on that front. That he's going to achieve a democracy there? That goal is lost, too. It's lost.' He adds: 'Right now, the course we're on, we're achieving Bin Laden's ends.'"