Last night I saw Bill Maher make a good point regarding the debate spin cycle: it’s funny how these candidates spend the entire year trying to convince voters that his opponent can’t walk and chew gum at the same time. But then as the debate approaches, the other guy suddenly becomes one of the great orators of our time.

The secret contents of another intelligence “guess” have been disclosed:

The same intelligence unit that produced a gloomy report in July about the prospect of growing instability in Iraq warned the Bush administration about the potential costly consequences of an American-led invasion two months before the war began, according to government officials.
The estimate came in two classified reports prepared for President George W. Bush in January 2003 by the National Intelligence Council, an independent group that advises the director of central intelligence. The assessments predicted that an American-led invasion of Iraq would increase support for political Islam and would result in a deeply divided Iraqi society prone to violent internal conflict.
One of the reports also warned of a possible insurgency against the new Iraqi government or American-led forces, saying that rogue elements from Saddam Hussein’s government could work with existing terrorist groups or act independently to wage guerrilla warfare, the officials said. The assessments also said a war would increase sympathy across the Islamic world for some terrorist objectives, at least in the short run, the officials said.

What can we glean from this?
(1) Someone in the intelligence community isn’t a happy camper and keeps leaking details from these classified reports;
(2) The meltdown formerly known as Iraq shouldn’t have come as a surprise to the Bush administration;
(3) The administration’s failure to plan for or respond to the insurgency demonstrates just how incompetent it is;
(4) There’s a good chance we’re generating more terrorism than we’re preventing by occupying Iraq.
How long do we have to repeatedly see this kind of information before American voters start to understand that pounding “resolve” into a podium is no substitute for sound foreign policy.

We’ve got four days for the political TV talking heads to hype up this week’s presidential debate. But just what kind of debate will we see?

Still, officials of the debate commission said they were agreeing primarily to those things Mr. Bush’s aides had emphasized as especially important to them: a strict time limit on candidate responses, an electronic warning when candidates exceed their speaking time that can be seen and heard by viewers at home, and a prohibition against the candidates’ directly posing questions to each other.

I don’t think the cosmetic and procedural rules are a big deal. But the latter condition–that candidates can’t question each other–is huge. Unless the moderator is really on top of it–and I don’t have great confidence he will be–it means that this “debate” will likely be little more than a glorified forum for the candidates to recite their canned talking points. Don’t expect a very substantive argument on the issues this Thursday night.

In Iraq, the U.S. government is risking thousands of American lives and spending hundreds of billions of dollars, allegedly in part to give Iraqi citizens the right to vote.
But here in America the government is threatening to disenfranchise thousands of newly-registered voters if their registration isn’t printed on 80-pound stock paper.
What a bizarre world we live in.
UPDATE: It may be even worse. According to this commenter, the Ohio Secretary of State itself distributed forms that don’t comply with the 80-pound requirement it is now attempting to enforce.

Our hard-headed decisive leader strikes again:

President Bush said he had no regrets about donning a flight suit to give his “Mission Accomplished” speech on Iraq in May 2003 and would do it all over again if he had the chance, according to excerpts from an television interview released on Sunday.
When asked by Fox News if he still would have put on a flight suit to declare major combat operations in Iraq over, Bush replied, “Absolutely.”

I guess that means we’ve had 900 Americans die in “minor” combat operations, if that’s any comfort to their families.
Several bloggers have noted how this response illustrates how detached from reality Bush is. But it really shouldn’t surprise anyone, should it? For months Bush has been boasting on his ability to smash U.S. foreign policy into the Iraqi wall without blinking. Do you think he’s going to lose sleep over a speech?
I think the more startling or disturbing part of the released excerpts is this:

Amid a rising U.S. death toll and a rash of abductions and beheadings in Iraq, some members of Bush’s own Republican Party have criticized him for not doing enough to secure insurgent areas in Iraq sooner.
But Bush said he also did not regret the decision to withdraw U.S. forces from the rebel stronghold of Falluja earlier this year because he believed the conflict there could have jeopardized the June handover of sovereignty to Iraqis.

You remember Falluja, don’t you? It’s the place where, against the military leaders’ best judgment Bush ordered a rushed attack against the city’s insurgency, then ordered them to pull out before they had finished their objectives. And the reason why? Because Bush didn’t want military operations interfering with the symbolic transfer of power.
How typical. The top priority in Bush world is not in doing the hard work to fix problems, it’s to “keep promises” for use on the campaign trail and to conduct meaningless photo-ops. And that’s one of the reasons Iraq is a mess today.