Random House scared to tackle Muhammad.

At least you can still write about the act of writing about Muhammad.

Praise Allah for the Internet. You don't have to browse the Wall Street Journal's opinion pages to find Asra Q. Nomani's August 6 op-ed piece, "You Still Can't Write About Muhammad."

It's about Random House being too afraid to make a prophet:

Note to other writers: This has nothing to do with Random House deciding not to publish you. Your manuscript sucks.

George Carlin is dead, but his words live on. Especially his big seven from his monologue "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television" on the 1972 album Class Clown:

Courtesy of Justin R. Erenkrantz, here's a transcription of that complete routine:

The New York Times pulled out of Iraq coverage even before the war started when it sent in Judy Miller to beat the WMD war drums.

But five years later, it still hasn't re-entered the battle, judging by its inept handling of the Bush-Bremer dustup over who was responsible for disbanding the Iraq Army back in 2003.

Ignoring explosive material published a year ago in the British press and played up practically everywhere in the world but in the major American papers, the Times downplayed SecDef Donald Rumsfeld's role in the tragic blunder of dismantling the army and police, and the paper didn't even mention Dick Cheney.

Over the weekend, Robert Draper, peddling his book Dead Certain, said Bush had been taken aback by the tragic decision announced by Bush regime czar Jerry Bremer to disband Iraq's army in the spring of 2003.

That was in a September 2 Times story by Jim Rutenberg, who apparently hadn't talked to Bremer about Bush's comments. (Rutenberg's story was just a hack job titled "In Book, Bush Peeks Ahead to His Legacy.") Bremer rushed over to the Times and dropped off a bundle of letters that, he claims, show that Bush knew of the plan and liked what Bremer was doing.

Here's how Times reporter Edmund L. Andrews handled the gift from Bremer in the September 4 story:

The Andrews story makes it sound as if Bremer was briefing Rumsfeld about this plan, that the plan was something that Bush and Bremer were hammering out. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In October 2006, David Blunkett, Britain's Home Secretary during the crucial pre-invasion and immediate post-invasion period, told all in an interview with the Guardian (U.K.) and the serialization of his diaries from that time. Unlike Bremer's book published earlier this year, Blunkett was candid about his screw-ups and about what he did — and didn't do. More importantly, he reveals just who was making the big decisions for the U.S. Here's a hint: It wasn't Bremer and it wasn't Bush. From the Guardian story by Patrick Wintour and Julian Glover:

This 2006 story wasn't totally ignored in the U.S. press. The Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum summed it up well on October 8, 2006:

Drum's right. It wasn't surprising in 2003 that the decision was being made by Rumsfeld and Cheney, not Bremer, and it certainly wasn't surprising in 2006. So why was the Times story so clueless?

This isn't the first time Times reporter Andrews has mishandled a big story. Back in 2004, Andrews blew a vital news angle about corporate tax breaks. Read my October 12, 2004, post, in which I wrote:

If you want something beyond my immature screed, read this October 2004 measured analysis of the corporate tax cuts, courtesy of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities' Joel Friedman.

Regarding the Bremer-Bush dustup and the blunder of dismantling the Iraq Army, the New Yorker's George Packer parses it and takes the long view. Packer also shrewdly notes that it's not wise to give the Bush regime too much credit for being orderly enough to make decisions. Bush's White House and Pentagon were, and are, a dysfunctional family. Writing about the blunder of dismantling the Iraq Army, Packer notes:

One current scandal glows brighter than the rest, but only because it simply glows brighter: the story of how renegade Russian Alexander Litvinenko was fatally poisoned by highly radioactive polonium-210 last November.

The supposed poisoning of a supposed spy took place over tea at London's Pine Bar, where fictional spies Sean Connery and George Lazenby used to lunch with 007 producer Cubby Broccoli. Beneath the cinematic tea-time episode at the Pine Bar is the tangled dance of George W. Bush and Vlad "The Paler" Putin. Even further beneath is a mixture of international oil politics. From Teapot Dome to Teapot Dumb, things haven't changed much.

Before the 9/11 deaths gave the Bush regime a reason to live, Bush himself called to mind Warren G. Harding, a president who sat on his porch swing while his oil-patch buddies plundered the Treasury, most famously in the Teapot Dome scandal. Bush's performance still brings Harding to mind.

Now, however, things are more complex. More on that later. The Litvinenko poisoning is colorful enough. It's laid out in a recent interview of head barman Norberto Andrade by Richard Gray in the Telegraph (U.K.):

Litvinenko later died of what was said to be a dose of polonium-210 that was 200 times the amount considered lethal. Traces of polonium were found all around the area where Litvinenko had been sitting. That naturally freaked out Andrade:

Britain — now under Tony Blair's successor, Gordon Brown — has angrily demanded the extradition from Russia of accused poisoner Andrei Lugovoi and has expelled Russian diplomats for Putin's refusal to do so.

Conservative anti-war drumbeater Justin Raimondo pooh-poohs the whole affair, saying oil politics are behind it all. He notes that Russia has shut out British oil giant BP from oil deals and he casts doubt on the whole poisoning episode:

It's always about the money and natural resources unnaturally extracted. Brown's anger at the Russians is matched by Bush's friendliness with ex-KGB chief Putin. Bush and Putin not only have a personal connection; they also have a business link. As Mark Baard wrote in a January 2004 Voice story about Bush's touting of a "hydrogen economy":

Yes, Bush and Putin personally struck a business deal in 2002 that gave Russia control over a key U.S. mining company:

Why was Bush touting hydrogen so much in the early days of his regime? Maybe it also had to do with the fact that when Bush tapped Jerry Bremer to run Iraq, Bremer was a board member of Air Products, a huge producer not only of hydrogen but of a plan to install hydrogen-fueling stations throughout the planet.

Hydrogen, platinum, nickel — these aren't radioactive. But the scandal of Bush's buddies making a mint off war and natural resources will cast a glow long after the polonium scandal dims to a flicker.

It's bad enough that the Pentagon's just-released report on Iraq contains some frightening news — some of it quite blunt — for U.S. soldiers and their families. But a closer look reveals some even worse news on the semantic front. In other words, the War Department tried like hell to put a smiley face on things but just couldn't. That means the situation is really bad.

The bottom line is that George W. Bush announced a "New Way Forward" on January 10 — the regime must have borrowed the name from Mao — and a "surge" of U.S. troops, officially named Operation Fardh al-Qanoon (Enforcing the Law, or Law and Order), was launched on February 14. The fardh is something of a farce. Known by its acronym of FAQ (someone has a sense of humor, even if it's unintentional), the surge was supposed to start quelling the violence in Baghdead. Instead, the number of attacks overall has risen and has spread from Baghdad to places like Diyala province.

Since the surge began, the percentage of attacks against the U.S. has declined slightly, but the percentage of attacks against civilians and Iraqi army and cops has increased. The overwhelming majority of attacks, as always, are aimed at American soldiers, proving once again that the only thing that unifies Iraqis who have guns and bombs is that they want us the hell out of their country.

The report's language, though, is the point. The report is titled "Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq." What it measures is instability and insecurity.

A key chapter is titled "National Reconciliation." What it measures is the increasing number of schisms, concluding that "some analysts see a growing fragmentation of Iraq."

"Some analysts"? That's a handy device used by the Pentagon to try to distance itself from its own conclusions. Reporters use that technique when asking tough questions without directly making the accusations themselves so that the conversation doesn't get too personal and the person being questioned will keep talking — "Some people say you did indeed take $10,000 in bribes, Congressman Phil N. DeBlank, and that the money, they say, was in small bills stuffed into a brown envelope."

Anyway, the report's section titled "Political Commitments" is about the lack thereof:

And the section titled "De-Ba'athification Reform" is actually about re-Ba'athification: the long-overdue strategy of re-admitting into the government bureaucracy people who were lesser members of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party — many people had to join Saddam's party to get government jobs, just as people on Long Island had to join the Nassau County GOP (until recently, the nation's most powerful local political machine) if they wanted jobs. The Bush regime and its preposterous pasha, Jerry Bremer, swept everyone out of the army and government in 2003, a move that since has been called the U.S.'s gravest miscalculation of the entire Iraq debacle.

Digression: Way back on May 14, 2003, when Bremer disbanded the Iraqi army, the San Francisco Chronicle's Robert Collier wrote:

Good move, Jerry. You earned your Medal of Freedom then and there. (See "Full Medal Jackoffs," December 15, 2004.)

Back to the current Pentagon report. On the re-Ba'athification, it notes:

To be fair, the report's section titled "Government Reform" is about something that hasn't yet happened:

And finally, the section titled "Rule of Law" shows that there isn't much:

One thing, however, that the surge has done is increase the number of people arrested:

"Beds"? Those are prison-cell beds. At last, some good news: We're building more prisons. That's something the U.S. knows about: We have the highest prison population rate in the world.

The report says the U.S. has vowed to show the Iraqis how to run their prisons. The report doesn't say who we're sending them to do that. Hopefully it's not Lynndie England.

George Tenet tried to rewrite his own role in history by going on 60 Minutes last night and calling the Iraq invasion "a national tragedy" that even he knew four years ago was unwarranted and unjustified.

But his own war-like words at the time put the lie to that claim. I'm not talking about his "slam-dunk" language. I'm quoting from his little-reported but highly public prayer a month before the invasion. Going public last night to promote his book, Tenet had this little colloquy with CBS's Scott Pelley:

Let's go back to early February 2003, a little more than a month before the unjustified invasion.

On February 5, 2003, Colin Powell made the Bush regime's case for war at the U.N. Security Council, even (straight out of Jonny Quest) showing slides of cartoony drawings of mobile WMD labs racing across the Iraqi desert.

The next day, February 6, was the National Prayer Breakfast, where the blood lust was palpable.

The AP's Ron Fournier wrote a perfunctory account of "the 51-year-old tradition that brings hundreds of lawmakers, military leaders, foreign heads of state, and spiritual leaders together in prayer." The crowd, wrote Fournier, "included 56 senators, 240 House members, first lady Laura Bush, National Security Director Condoleezza Rice, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and CIA Director George Tenet."

Fournier dutifully quoted Bush (read the POTUS's own version):

Tenet also spoke at the prayer breakfast, as I previously noted, and nobody was more hawkish. His words didn't make news. (C-SPAN last showed the event video on February 9, 2003.) But this is what he said, I kid you not. The CIA director walked to the podium and, with no introductory remarks, intoned his own cartoonish view of the world:

Breastplates? And you wonder why Saracens have referred to Bush and his henchmen as "Crusaders"?

Leave aside the fact that the armor supplied by the Defense Department was inadequate — as soldiers told SecDeaf Don Rumsfeld to his face and as my colleague Tom Robbins wrote about in an October 2004 story about soldiers' families.

You can also leave aside the rest of Tenet's homily, which focused on "forgiveness and mercy." That's because Tenet sounded even more like an Old Testament character, condescending and patronizing — you know, slay your enemies but be charitable toward them:

Tenet then sat down. Four years later, the war he supported and promoted has killed as many Americans in Iraq as the number killed in New York City on 9/11.

And now, having put down the good book and picked up his own, Tenet's preaching a different tune.

"The hardest part of all of this has just been listening to this for almost three years," he told Pelley, adding: