BRENDAN O’NEILL writes on historical revisionism by antiwar folks:

This canonisation of the rational inspectors, in contrast to hysterical Bush and Blair, is a spectacular rewriting of history. . . .

Far from being anti-war, Hans Blix, David Kelly and the rest helped to make war an easy option for the West. The inspectors’ differences with Bush and Blair in the past year have nothing to do with opposing Western intervention in Iraq – and everything to do with cynically defending their special position on the world stage. . . .

Rather, the inspectors’ sudden turnaround – from being ‘deeply suspicious’ about Iraq to claiming that Iraq is not a threat after all – is driven by a far more squalid clash with the US and UK governments. In criticising Bush and Blair, the inspectors are merely attempting to defend their own position rather than actually challenging America and Britain’s actions in Iraq. The inspectors thrived on a climate of suspicion about Iraq, on the notion that Saddam might potentially be a threat and must constantly be kept in check just in case. The inspectors are irritated by Bush and Blair’s war because it knocked them off their perch, undermining their authority and purpose on the world stage.

Bureaucratic politics. Imagine that!

UPDATE: Read this, too.

HOWARD KURTZ HAS A ROUNDUP on media dishonesty coyness regarding exit-poll data. That’s something that I posted on earlier.

REPORT FROM THE COUCH: Will Wilkinson says that the article by Noah Shachtman from The American Prospect to which I linked the other day, on libertarians disenchanted with Bush, was a bit, um, incestuous in its sourcing. Hmm. He never called me, and I never slept in Gene Healy’s basement . . . .

Guess I’m not one of the “in” crowd. But then, I never seem to be.

WALKING BACK THE CAT: Austin Bay has another column looking at intelligence failures, and successes, leading up to the war in Iraq.

HERE’S A SURPRISINGLY POSITIVE (for the New York Times) article on Iraq. Not cheerleading, by any means, but recognizing that there’s good stuff happening, and that there’s more than one storyline. That’s progress, I’d say.

NEW COMMERCIAL SPACE LEGISLATION: I haven’t read it yet, but Rand Simberg has a summary.

MORE EVIDENCE that sex is good for you.

But you knew that already, right?

I’VE MENTIONED THE MOVIE BURNING ANNIE BEFORE, and if you’re in the New York area you can see it at the Hamptons Film Festival in a couple of weeks. (You can see trailers here.)

WESLEY CLARK, MANCUR OLSON AND THE BLOGOSPHERE: James Moore has some thoughts in response to my Recall Arnold! post from yesterday.

RALPH PETERS WRITES THAT BUSH IS BETRAYING THE KURDS: This is damning stuff if true — nasty, and stupid besides. It’s not clear to me, however, that it is true. But it bears watching.

The rap on America in the Middle East has always been that it screws its friends and appeases its enemies. We’re supposed to be changing that.

UPDATE: Zach Barbera emails:

While being still somewhat skeptical of Turkey’s good will in Iraq. I find it amusing that now that the Iraqi Governing Council has something bad to say about an American deal, the media suddenly finds the IGC legitimate.

Hmm. I’m tempted to spin a “rope-a-dope” theory based on that observation, but I think I’ll restrain myself this one time.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Austin Bay has some (almost blog-like!) comments over at StrategyPage:

This puts the forces of a major Muslim nation in Iraq as peacekeepers, which is a political coup for the US. At the same time, the troops are (of course) Turks. Turkey has numerous current interests in Iraq as well as deep historical connections. Many Kurds and Arabs in Iraq have abundant reasons to distrust Turkey. There is also the possibility of political blowback inside Turkey. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is taking a huge domestic political risk. To say the majority of the Turkish population is uneasy about getting involved in Iraq puts it mildly.

Bay doesn’t seem that enthusiastic — if you read the whole post, I think it’s fair to say that he characterizes it as high-risk, but only medium return.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The Dignified Rant thinks that Peters is letting his hostility to the Turks, and his enthusiasm for a Kurdish state, distort his judgment here.

ALPHECCA’S MEDIA GUN BIAS CHART has some astonishing information this week.

UPDATE: Somehow had the wrong link before. Fixed now.

JUST IN CASE you’d gotten out of the habit of checking in with him, Stephen Green has been blogging up a storm lately.

ACCORDING TO ARMED LIBERAL, the California recall wasn’t enough of a wake-up call for everybody.

STEVEN DEN BESTE OBSERVES:

Yesterday the citizens of the State of California performed a coup without firing a shot, and equally important, the government didn’t resist it. On the contrary, the government ran the election by which that coup was implemented, and counted the votes honestly, and its leader accepted the result.

The fact of the recall itself is far more important than the details of why it took place. It could just as easily have been a recall of a conservative governor to be replaced by a liberal. If, two years from now, the citizens of California decide to recall Schwarzenegger so as to replace him with Barbara Streisand, then she’ll become our governor.

And the beauty of that reality outweighs concerns with the result, doesn’t it? At least, it should.

THIS ARTICLE says that Howard Dean is paying bloggers. I think this means Matt Gross, et al., who are running his campaign blog. But, just in case you were wondering, I’m not on the Dean payroll.

UPDATE: Chortle. When I posted the above, I thought I was just being cute. But apparently some commenters in this thread from LGF actually think I’m on the Dean payroll. Uh, no. And I don’t actually turn puppies into a refreshing energy drink, either. Sheesh.

Nobody pays me to do this stuff. Sadly, probably nobody would. . . .

Really, I think the story that everyone’s so excited about is being misconstrued. I think Dean’s paying Matt Gross, just as Clark is paying Cam Barrett. I don’t think the story’s about sub rosa payments to bloggers for good treatment. Try reading it again.

THE BOSTON FBI SCANDALS JUST GET WORSE:

BOSTON – A former FBI agent who handled high-profile mob informants in Boston was arrested Thursday and charged with the 1981 mob-related murder of a Tulsa, Okla., businessman, his lawyer says.

H. Paul Rico, 78, is charged with murder and conspiracy to commit murder in the death of Roger Wheeler, the 55-year-old chairman of Tulsa-based Telex Corp., who was shot in the head after playing a round of golf at Southern Hills Country Club on May 27, 1981.

Investigators have said Rico provided John Martorano, a hit man for the Boston-based Winter Hill Gang, with information on Wheeler’s schedule so he could be killed.

This is just the latest in a series of problems growing out of the Boston FBI office, problems that suggest management issues with the FBI generally.

MATT WELCH WON’T MISS Gray Davis. Not one little bit.

BLOGS I SHOULD LINK MORE OFTEN: Howard Lovy’s Nanobot, Donald Sensing’s One Hand Clapping, Arthur Silber’s Light of Reason, JoanneJacobs.com, AngryLeft, Silent Running, Silflay Hraka, VikingPundit, John Cole’s Balloon Juice, David Hogberg’s Cornfield Commentary, HeadHeeb, SayUncle, Kathy Kinsley’s On The Third Hand, PrairiePundit, FuturePundit, QuasiPundit, ParaPundit, isntapundit, and, no doubt, a whole lot of others.

I try to get around, honest. But there are so many blogs, and so little time.

DISCUSSIONS OF THE TURKS’ decision to send troops to Iraq have focused on whether the Iraqis like it (they don’t) and whether it’s bad for the Kurds (it might be). Both of these are important issues, and if I had my druthers, I’d keep the Turks out.

But the issue that I haven’t seen discussed is what this means from the Turks’ perspective — and I think that one of the things it means is that the Turks think we’re winning. If the Turks expected Iraq to dissolve into the bloody quagmire that some media types and pundits are still claiming it is, I expect that they’d keep well out of things.

LYNNE KIESLING has comments on Arnold’s energy platform.

DANIEL DREZNER has more on media coverage of Iraq.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, here’s another firsthand account.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here, too.

THE BLOVIATOR LINKS to an important public health announcement.

AFTER ARAFAT DIES: Meryl Yourish has some thoughts about what to expect.

MARK STEYN ON PLAME:

If sending Joseph C. Wilson IV to Niger for a week is the best the world’s only hyperpower can do, that’s a serious problem. If the Company knew it was a joke all along, that’s a worse problem. It means Mr Bush is in the same position with the CIA as General Musharraf is with Pakistan’s ISI: when he makes a routine request, he has to figure out whether they’re going to use it to try and set him up. This is no way to win a terror war.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Meanwhile Mark Kleiman writes:

If you’re used to the idea that the people around George Bush do bad things, then it may be easy for you to swallow burning Valerie Plame as just another bad thing they did. But most of the bad things (bad, that is, in my view) that Bush and his colleagues do don’t seem bad to them, or at least seem justified. (Sliming John McCain to win the South Carolina primary? Just politics; too bad, but that’s the way the game is played.) From the very beginning, it’s been hard for me to see how any of those folks could have talked themselves into an act so appallingly wrong according to their own standards.

It was hard for me to see that, too, but when I pointed it out people were accusing me of shilling for the Administration. Ron Bailey is sounding the same theme over at Reason:

Why would anyone in the White House think revealing that Joseph C. Wilson IV’s wife worked under cover for the CIA would “punish” or “intimidate” him for publishing an article critical of the Bush Administration’s use of bogus information about supposed Iraqi efforts to obtain uranium from the African country of Niger? If disclosing that information was aimed at somehow “discrediting” Wilson, it was just plain stupid. Besides being illegal, it just makes Wilson seem more credible, not less.

Why, yes. That’s what I thought, too. As I noted a while back:

But it doesn’t make sense to me. First, if you want to “intimidate” someone, committing a felony at which you can be caught — and which doesn’t hurt the target — doesn’t seem to be the way to do it. What possible benefit was there to the Bush Administration in saying that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA? When what they could have said is what the British did say, which is that Wilson was gullible and inept? Had Plame been fired on a pretext, or Wilson’s taxes been audited, or some such, then there’d be an “intimidation” argument. But this?

Meanwhile, as Kleiman notes, the “six reporters” to whom the story was allegedly shopped and that we’ve heard so much about may not even exist — rather, they may have been contacted after Novak’s story. Seems like this case really is complicated, after all. Advantage: InstaPundit!

And I grow steadily more suspicious of the CIA role in this as time goes on. I was already in favor of seeing Tenet fired — and have been pretty much since 9/11 — so this isn’t exactly a deciding factor for me. But perhaps it should be a deciding factor for President Bush.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Roger Simon notes: “I think the great mystery that possibly is underlying the entire Plame/Wilson Affair is why Tenet was not fired in the first place after 9/11.”

Well, things are still complicated, so I’m not sure I’ll say that it’s the mystery underlying Plame. But, to me at least, it’s a mystery all its own.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Doug Levene emails:

In addition to your suspicions about CIA treachery afoot, I would add my dismay that Wilson is getting a free ride for perfectly dishonorable behavior, namely writing an Op-Ed about the results of a confidential mission that he undertook for the CIA simply because he was pissed off that the president failed to take his advice. I always thought that if you worked for the CIA, your work product stayed in Langley. That principle applies just as much to a one-time special assignment as to a career employee. Why aren’t all the folks so indignant about protecting the sanctity of the CIA concerned about Wilson’s breach of his duty of loyalty and confidentiality?

I think that the CIA is in desperate need of some re-engineering, and that Bush has been handed an excuse to do it.

MORE: Donald Sensing says that nobody really wants to expose the leaker, regardless of party, for obvious Washington institutional reasons.

But I do!

STILL MORE: Reader Frank Walters wonders:

Quite aside from alleged White House revenge motiations, nothing else about the Wilson/Plame dust-up makes any sense. Does not the CIA realize that assigning a covert agent’s spouse to a special mission doubles the risk to both of exposure should either be revealed (particularly if both relate to WMDs)? I am amazed that they do not have a policy against such paralled missions for spouses. And does not Joseph Wilson have enough experience in public life to realize that stirring up a huge media storm increases whatever danger there is to his wife of being exposed through his mission (even if Novak had revealed her CIA connection earlier)? Finally, was his mission not classified? If so, why is he not in violation of the law by revealing its details? If it was not classified, assigning it to the spouse of a covert CIA agent makes even less sense.

I agree.

MORE STILL: Here.

THERE’S LOTS OF GOOD STUFF over at Gregg Easterbrook’s Easterblogg — and his discussion of Mel Gibson’s Christ movie, and in particular his mention of Simon of Cyrene, reminds me of my high-school summer spent acting in the Smoky Mountain Passion Play, in which I sometimes played Simon (in makeup; I was the understudy). I was also understudy for the Thief On The Left, and I can report firsthand that crucifixion has nothing to recommend it, even when it’s not for real.