The War on Terror: A Masterpiece of Propaganda: “Since Sept. 11, 2001, the administration of George W. Bush has told and repeated a lie that is… a mega-lie, and the American people have come to believe it. It is the War on Terror.”Propaganda to go to war from the Bush Administration? Shocking! Author Richard W. Behan lays out an interesting look at the anatomy of creating a mega-lie.

Former Russian President Boris Yeltsin died yesterday at the age of 76:

Yeltsin, who had suffered health problems since resigning from office on December 31, 1999, suffered sudden heart failure, medical sources told Russia’s Interfax news agency. […]

Yeltsin became the first democratically elected president of Russia in 1991 and two months later put down a coup attempt against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. […]

Dougherty said everything about Yeltsin was larger than life.

“He was oversized, he was huge, everything about him — he was physically a giant, a big-barrel chest of complete charisma,” she said. “When you met him or were around him he was absolutely charismatic.”

While Yeltsin may have been a failed statesman, Dougherty said he had a unique ability to connect with people.

And that is exactly what I’ll remember most about Yeltsin — his charismatic nature as a world leader that drew you in and made you stop to listen, similar to the effect Bill Clinton has on people. Well, that… and the wacky dancing…

President Bush’s new-fangled strategy for success in Iraq (or NFSFSII for short) to commit 20,000 additional troops to Baghdad isn’t resting favorably with most people.

Or with any that I can find, really.

That might be because the Administration basically tried this plan without much ballyhoo already, when, five months ago, they put an additional 10,000 troops in Baghdad. And look how successful that turned out to be.

So who doesn’t think Bush’s plan to add a pinch of salt to the giant pot of sh*t cooking in Iraq will help things there? (Hat tip to Jon Stewart for conjuring up that nugget.)

Well, there’s the people Bush is supposed to represent: Two-thirds of Americans oppose more troops in Iraq. Americans don’t like Bush’s plan to put more Americans in harm’s way, nor Bush’s job performance in general. His latest approval rating hit a new low of 32%.

Rep. John Murtha, an outspoken critic of Bush’s Iraq “policy,” calls out the President’s new strategy as a non-starter and more of the same:

A year ago, I said this was a failed policy wrapped in an illusion. The President has finally acknowledged this.

Five months ago, we put an additional 10,000 troops in Baghdad. Attacks increased and a record number of Americans and Iraqis were killed. I see no difference between this and the President’s plan to “stay the course.”

But at least Iraqis in Baghdad like the idea of additional troops being sent there, right? Wrong: In Baghdad, Bush Policy Is Met With Resentment:

Iraq’s Shiite-led government offered only a grudging endorsement on Thursday of President Bush’s proposal to deploy more than 20,000 additional troops in an effort to curb sectarian violence and regain control of Baghdad. The tepid response immediately raised questions about whether the government would make a good-faith effort to prosecute the new war plan.

So really, Bush’s new plan is a dressed-up version of an already-failed policy that no one is in support of. So much for “the surge”.

Jon Stewart put it best on tonight’s Daily Show:

20,000 troops? We have 130,000 there now. That’s only a 15% increase. That’s not a surge… that’s a gratuity. That’s a tip. And that’s not even a good tip. That’s a lousy one.

Bush: failed policy-maker. And now you can add to that: lousy tipper.

Someone should tell Bush that the Iraq War is not Michael Jordan:

Back in the 1990s when I was a huge NBA fan, they used to say about Michael Jordan: “You can’t stop him, you can only hope to contain him.” Except for people like Nancy Pelosi, Jack Murtha, Ted Kennedy and a few others, the Washington Democrats, Republicans and the pundit class are all saying as much about the Iraq War, but even worse: that Congress can’t stop it, nor can it even hope to contain it. […]

Congress can stop the Iraq War, or at least the escalation of it, no matter how many people in Washington use these Jordan-esque descriptions to justify their own pathetic refusal to do what the vast majority of Americans want.

Unless you were watching a rented copy of The Illusionist on DVD, like my friend Nikki was around 9pm tonight, you probably caught a glimpse of President Bush announcing his new strategy to “win” in Iraq against “the killers.” (It was on every channel!)

Linking the fight in Iraq with the greater war on terror, President Bush told the nation there is “no magic formula for success in Iraq” but that failure there “would be a disaster for the United States.”

Speaking from the White House Wednesday night as about 50 protesters gathered outside, Bush said he will increase American forces by more than 20,000, the vast majority of them coming from “five brigades [that] will be deployed to Baghdad.” […]

Bush said that if the situation in Iraq does not turn for the better, “Radical Islamic extremists would grow in strength and gain new recruits.” […]

In the Democrat-controlled Senate, [Majority Leader Harry] Reid said senators are working on a nonbinding resolution opposing more troops, and he said several Republicans are likely to support it. The House plans to raise a similar resolution.

Its simply amazing that over 5 years after 9/11, Bush is still speaking with the same cliches and rhetoric he did in 2001. He rarely adds any real idea to the discussion and he still warns us to watch out for those “killers.”

Did someone just wake Dubya up? As usual, his plan “for success” is coming years too late. We wouldn’t want radical Islamic extremists to grow in strength, as Bush said in tonight’s speech. Oh yeah, like what has already happened in both Afghanistan and Iraq? Oops, wouldn’t want that to happen. Yet it already did.

Maybe Barrack Obama has a point:

Illinois Democratic Sen. Barack Obama, often mentioned as a possible 2008 presidential candidate, told CNN’s “Larry King Live” that he “didn’t see any political strategy in the president’s remarks to get Sunni and Shia to arrive at the political accommodation” necessary for peace.

Obama said he would rather see troops redeployed to “Afghanistan and other areas where we can fight the battle against terrorism and al Qaeda.”

“The burden of proof is now on the administration and the Iraqi government to show they can now make progress,” he said.

Bush didn’t mention a proposed solution for Afghanistan in tonight’s speech, did he? The American public is really getting tired of all the nonsense that comes out of this Administration. The polls say it, the people are saying it, and the 2006 midterm elections showed it.

Yet as more than 3000 American troops have been killed in this conflict and Iraq has sunk into a civil war, the Bush Administration is more interested in tying up the loose ends of their presidential legacy. What happened to a government elected by and representative of the people? Congress is finally getting there, but that democratic ideal applies to the Executive Branch as well.

And yes, that applies to war time as well. This isn’t a free-for-all; this is America. And the Iraq War is not Michael Jordan.

AND THEN THERE’S THIS: Bush upset by Hussein hanging video: “President Bush was upset after watching the video of Saddam Hussein’s execution, comparing it to how he felt after seeing the photographs of Iraqi prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, White House officials said Wednesday.”