BartBlog

Next week’s Scribe arrives at your digital doorstep a whole week early, and shortly after this week’s. Scribe had a creative bug buzzing in his head and decided to open his flytrap mind and, like Willy, set it free! Set Willy FREE! (”Free Willy?” Always sounds like a cross between the movies, a South Park episode and a dirty joke, doesn’t it?) Besides, Scribe will be busy next week cleaning the wax Homeland Security forced into his ears to shut him up. Yes, “ears.” Damn corrupt BFEE contractors, can’t trust any of them to do anything right, and Junior LIKES it that way.

But, before out feature presentation…

Links to Oblivions and Other FUN Places
“Proving just how NUTS humanity is; using the Internet.”

Guess Junior’s AmeriKKKa isn’t the only place gone SQUIRRELY.

This Week’s News Dump
“When ‘Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood’ meets septic tank.”

It’s a little like Uncle Sam being forced to pull down his pants and crap while everyone watches it descend. Tell Scribe AGAIN how Junior is going to make the military better?”

The DUMP. (”Mus ‘turd‘ gas?”)

Now for our feature presentation: “Da Bomb…“

The sound of singing from inside a closet in the White House…

It takes a worried King
To have a worried mind…
I’m worried now;
But I won’t be worried long…

Let’s step into Scribe’s time machine and go back ten minutes. Junior is attending a meeting of his not so merry band of criminals. They’re so bad even Butch Cassidy would have winced, and Sundance wouldn’t even think them worth the bullet. Anywho… they’re discussing the abandoned Gay bomb. You know, the one the media has been trying not to laugh about.

Junior: He, he, garf, snort, spew snot, snicker…

Snowjob: What’s so funny, Sir?

Junior: Ya know dat Gay bum we said we were going to ah-band-dum?

Condi: “Abandon,” Sir.

Junior: Hey, BITCHIE, didn’t I’s tell ya not to corruct me?

Condi: Sorry, Honey… uh, Sir.

(Laura shoots her a look so acidic it would melt The Terminator, which is why Arnold became just one more political shill for the BFEE.)

Junior: Dat bumb? I told Halli-burp-ton to drop it on da protustors outside da White House

Laura: Uh, Poop-see, isn’t that just a tad too close?

Junior: Damn, just can’t get a wurd in wid des bitches in-tur-rupting

Laura: Sorry, Poochakins

Junior: Laura, I told ya, I’m the one who makes da childish nicknumes up. Anywho, they should be droppin it about now…

(Rove rushes in.)

Karl: Damn, damn: DAMN! Just got a report from our stormtroopers at the SS: what used be called the Secret Service. Halliburton fucked up AGAIN. Seems a substitute pilot snuck in while they were off screwing something else up. One  “Michaelangelo Signorile?” …host of a GLBT talk show on Sirius. He’s targeting us.

Junior: Guldern, dang, I dunt wanna be no fagg…

Junior runs to the closet/bomb shelter made by Kellogg, Brown and Root and sealed, poorly, with chewing gum chawed on by the contracting firm, another tentacle of Halliburton: Militant Midgets for the BFEE. Their motto?

“We always come up SHORT.”

As the Gay gas (formulated by secretly collecting from bean suppers held after Village People revival concerts held across the country)… seeps into the closet, and up Junior’s vile, encrusted, nostrils, he sings once again…)

Condi’s in the bathroom
Sucking Laura’s toes
Al’s in the Oval Office
Kissin Snowjob’s on the nose
Karl’s bangin on my door
Wants me to what his wang grow
I’m worried now
But I won’t be worried long

It takes a worried King
To have a worried mind…
I’m worried now;
But I won’t be worried long…

(Apologies to the Kingston Trio, and other fine folk groups, for ruining an otherwise good song… Scribe)

And, once the gas seeped into the closet, thanks to our hero, Michaelangelo, Junior “came out” and then pulled out of Iraq, didn’t go into Iran, but decided to meet up with Tony and do a little “I ram” instead. He signed a Gay marriage amendment and asked Laura to redecorate the White House; stripping it of those tacky swastikas hanging from all the walls, paint the walls pink… with just a dab of chartreuse trim. Peace conquered the planet, at least until our next episode…

So stay tuned for our next episode of Da Bomb, where Biggus Dickus returns from another hunting trip of shooting caged puppies, and uses a powerful serum made out sheep excrement in an attempt to un-Gay the White House. Titled: Piss On Ewe.

This week’s YOS will be short and not so sweet. Scribe doesn’t want to clutter it up with extra features because an important point must be made…

Ashcroft and covering statues!

Gonzo and lies!

Condi: the Britney Spears/Paris Hilton of the mis-administration… trying on a millionth set of ruby red, Marcos-like, slippers while insisting some “rude” free speech advocate be arrested for interrupting her “mirror, mirror on the wall” moment…

If we get rid of one foul-smelling appointment, surely he would appoint someone better, right? He wouldn’t go out of his way to find an even BIGGER asshole, would he?

FORGET ALL THAT.

Since Junior stole his thorny crown, apologies to Don McLean, we have provided excuses, YES, EXCUSES, for Junior.

Why does he tolerate ineptness, corruption? He must be uninvolved, disinterested, STUPID…

Stop it!

STOP IT!

Junior is the head of this vile beast and all of the above is INTENTIONAL. He LIKES it this way. Scribe’s guess? If any of these people were serving a more honest, less corrupt, less criminal president they would behave far better. They act this way because he LIKES IT.

Like knights flailing away at windmills, pundits, the public and pols should be beheading the dragon… legally.

If that’s even possible at this late date.

Otherwise?

Drag out the guillotine.

Popcorn anyone? The whimpering and the pitiful cries alone would be VERY entertaining.

Paul Krugman, The New York Times, June 11, 2007

Rich liberals who claim they’ll help America’s less fortunate are phonies.

Let me give you one example — a Democrat who said he’d work on behalf of workers and the poor. He even said he’d take on Big Business. But the truth is that while he was saying those things, he was living in a big house and had a pretty lavish summer home too. His favorite recreation, sailing, was incredibly elitist. And he didn’t talk like a regular guy.

Clearly, this politician wasn’t authentic. His name? Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Luckily, that’s not how the political game was played 70 years ago. F.D.R. wasn’t accused of being a phony; he was accused of being a “traitor to his class.” But today, it seems, politics is all about seeming authentic. A recent Associated Press analysis of the political scene asked: “Can you fake authenticity? Probably not, but it might be worth a try.”

What does authenticity mean? Supposedly it means not pretending to be who you aren’t. But that definition doesn’t seem to fit the way the term is actually used in political reporting.

For example, the case of F.D.R. shows that there’s nothing inauthentic, in the normal sense of the word, about calling for higher taxes on the rich while being rich yourself. If anything, it’s to your credit if you advocate policies that will hurt your own financial position. But the news media seem to find it deeply disturbing that John Edwards talks about fighting poverty while living in a big house.

On the other hand, consider the case of Fred Thompson. He spent 18 years working as a highly paid lobbyist, wore well-tailored suits and drove a black Lincoln Continental. When he ran for the Senate, however, his campaign reinvented him as a good old boy: it leased a used red pickup truck for him to drive, dressed up in jeans and a work shirt, with a can of Red Man chewing tobacco on the front seat.

But Mr. Thompson’s strength, says Lanny Davis in The Hill, is that he’s “authentic.”

Read More Here

Dear Mother Grimgold,

Thank you very much for your candid and important talk about inflation. While, your example is simple and easy to understand and while I was always taught not to question or correct my elders, I did want to point out why things are even a little worse than your example illustrates.

> In ten years, prices have easily increased 30% (that’s only 3% per year).

The effects of inflation are compounding, similar to compounding interest. So to realize 30% inflation over a period of 10 years, you need only have an annualized inflationary rate of about 2.66%. If you have an average annual inflationary rate of 3% then over a 10 year period your purchasing power would have actually decreased by 34.4% (over one third). That means that at 3% annual, in any given 24 year period the effective cost of goods and services doubles!

A few days ago I was staring at the one-eyed monster. CNN was showing footage of Paris Hilton looking like a caged feral cat at the same time as the L.A. County sheriff was droning on, “Our prisons are overcrowded, that’s why Miss Hilton was sent home…”
As everyone knows twenty eight percent of our prison population in L.A. County consists of illegals causing the overcrowding.
Now a long-haired, greasy looking attorney was staring into the screen, trying to appear credible, “This is perfectly normal. Paris didn’t murder anyone, you know. She should have been released…”
Then it hit me. ‘Oh my God! Because of our illegal problem Paris Hilton has been released! (Gasp!)’
All the other illegal issues: working for cash at less than minimum wage, receiving free medical care and free schooling, getting welfare… All these paled compared to the menacing problem that now reared its perfectly coiffed head – dozens of Hollywood’s other macabre experiments wildly driving up and down Sunset Boulevard, no license, so drunk they can’t remember who they are.
And all this started by George Bush, Congress and Paris Hilton!
Nip this trend in the bud before any more Hollywood dim-bulbs get the idea, grab their car keys, and head for the nearest bar!
Enforce our immigration laws!
Keep Paris in jail!
Grimgold

Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, June 10, 2007

WASHINGTON — Be honest. Who would you rather share a foxhole with: a gay soldier or Mitt Romney?

A gay soldier, of course. In a dicey situation like that, you need someone steadfast who knows who he is and what he believes, even if he’s not allowed to say it out loud.

Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue, as the gloriously gay Oscar Wilde said. And gays are the sacrifice that hypocritical Republican candidates offer to placate “values” voters — even though some candidates are not so finicky about morals regarding their own affairs and divorces.

They may coo over the photo of Dick Cheney, whose re-election campaign demonized gays, proudly smiling with his new grandson, the first baby of his lesbian daughter, Mary.

But they’ll hold the line, by jiminy, against gay Americans who are willing to die or be horribly disfigured in the cursed Bush/Cheney war in Iraq.

Peter Pace, whose job as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff became a casualty of Iraq on Friday, asserted in March that homosexual acts “are immoral.” Yet in May, he wrote a letter to the judge in the Scooter Libby case, pleading for leniency for the Cheney aide. Scooter always looked for “the right way to proceed — both legally and morally,” General Pace wrote of the man who lied to a grand jury about the outing of a spy, after he pumped up the fake case for the war that has claimed the lives of 3,500 young men and women serving under the general.

At the G.O.P. debate in New Hampshire last week, the contenders were more homophobic than the mobsters on “The Sopranos,” unanimously supporting the inane “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Even Rudy Giuliani, who loves to cross-dress and who stayed with old friends, a gay couple, to avoid Gracie Mansion when his second marriage was disintegrating, had an antediluvian answer.

Wolf Blitzer asked him about the Arabic linguists trained by the government who have been ousted from the military after being outed.

Mr. Giuliani, who procured three deferments to avoid Vietnam, replied that, with the war in Iraq raging, “This is not the time to deal with disruptive issues like this.”

Read More Here

Alright, children, listen up. Mother Grimgold is going to show you something really, really basic and really, really important, that is no longer taught in our schools, and that you need to understand.
Long, long ago, when we had ice boxes rather than refrigerators, and a man was as good as his word, there was a thing called the silver certificate. The silver cert was the dollar bill. Your dollar bill today is not a silver cert, but it used to be.
So why a silver certificate? Because you could go to the Federal Reserve, turn in your silver certs, and get silver. Yes. You could actually take possession of little bags of silver.
Well, why on earth would the Fed do a silly thing like that? Why bother?
Wrong question. The correct question is why did they quit doing it?
But I digress.
The point is, paper money used to be redeemable. Huh? Why? What’s this about?
Really, really simple.
When people came to the Federal Reserve window and said “Gimme money,” the Fed would accept silver and hand over paper dollars. The Fed, in effect, would put more money into circulation. When people came to the window and said “Gimme silver,” the Fed would automatically take back the paper dollars, removing them from circulation.
So why is this boring economic stuff important? Why am I bothering to write this?
Because when this was the way the Federal Reserve operated, we had no inflation.
Sure, prices fluctuated because of supply and demand pressures, but that’s not inflation. Inflation is the dollar itself becoming worth less, this caused by continually pumping more and more of them into the economy. And even a little inflation is not a good thing.
Now, the bleeding hearts among us whine about the plight of the poor and those on fixed incomes. They also feel empathy for the working man, who never quite makes a living wage and has to “fight” for more pay.
But if there was no inflation don’t you see that it would be easier on these people? In ten years, prices have easily increased 30% (that’s only 3% per year).
Why?
Inflation!
This is really hard on the poor, the elderly, and the working man.
So how’s this problem solved?
Make money redeemable once again, and respond accordingly. When people need money, print it. When they don’t, stop printing it. You’ll know when to print it because people will be asking for it to run their businesses and such. You’ll know when to quit, because they’ll be demanding silver.

For 130 years, America had no inflation. Then, beginning in 1930 (approximately) we began to have inflation and have had it ever since.
Your federal government says “A little inflation is a good thing.” Oh yeah, right. Your money becoming worth less is a good thing? I don’t think so.
I say let’s begin printing redeemable dollars again and kill inflation.
Think about this, please. It’s important. And don’t be intimidated by the Greenspans and Bernankes of the world. They want you to believe economics is so complex and so filled with weird words and ideas, that you will never understand it.
But they have something that sticks out like a sore toe – a poor track record. If they, in all their grandness and wonderfulness, were so darn good, how come today we fear “renewed out of control inflation”? Let them experiment and play with someone else’s economy. We need a solid, stable, redeemable dollar.
Now you understand.
Most people still don’t. That’s why the federal government gets away with this.
Please join me in calling for the return to non-inflating money.
Grimgold

So Cheney’s pacemaker battery is wearing out and he needs a new one. Given the scarcity of health care in this country it’s time to start rationing and I choose Dick as someone who should not be helped. He should set an example. Also, I have lots of valid reasons:

1. Dickie is 66 years old. He’s not too far away from living out the average lifespan of a person who was born when he was. So it’s really time for him to go.
2. Dickie and his right-wing, Christian fundamentalist, supporters allegedly believe in God and an afterlife. So why is he afraid to go there? If Dickie is not afraid to receive his eternal reward he shouldn’t be concerned. After all, it’s supposed to be so much better.
3. Dickie and his right-wing, Christian fundamentalist, supporters don’t believe in evolution. Therefore they must reject the current science of biology and all its tenets. That would include much of the medical profession. So why would such a disbeliever want to trust all those lefty, liberal people who do believe in science with his life? He shouldn’t. He should just opt out.
4. Dickie is really an evil bastard. This proposition is self-evident. Dickie supports torture and extreme rendition. Maybe someone should disappear Dickie the same way the US disappears alleged terrorists.
5. Dickie is a voyeur. Recently evidence has surfaced that Dickie fought hard to justify the illegal warantless wire-tapping of US Citizens. Dickie is not an attorney but apparently he thinks he knows more than the lawyers at the Justice Department.

I’m sure there is more. The simple fact is Dickie is living on borrowed time. I personally think his time should be up.

Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation, June 7, 2007

Last month’s failed missile defense test was categorized as a “No Test” by the Missile Defense Agency (MDA). The target missile didn’t fly into range of the interceptor so it was never launched.

Even though it was deemed a “No Test” by the MDA, an agency spokesman nevertheless claimed that the results of “the failed test underscored the need of the US to install 10 interceptors in Poland and a tracking radar station in the Czech Republic as a defense against potential missile attack from Iran…. It showed that any missiles that Iran launched could similarly go astray and land in Europe even if Europe was not Iran’s target.”

Huh?

Welcome to what Joseph Cirincione – senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and author of the new book, Bomb Scare – calls, “This week’s episode of President Bush in Fantasyland.”

“President Bush is rushing to deploy a technology that does not work against a threat that does not exist,” Cirincione says. “Iran is at least 5 to 10 years away from the capability to build a nuclear weapon and at least that far from having a missile that could hit Europe let alone the US. And anti-missile systems are still nowhere near working despite $150 billion spent since the 1983 Star Wars program started and years of phony tests staged to demonstrate ‘progress’ and ‘success.’”

None of this has stopped Bush from continuing to tout his Czech Republic and Poland-based “proposed missile defense system designed to thwart a possible nuclear attack from Iran.” Adding to the irony (and the outrage) is the fact that while Bush continues to frame the weapons system as indispensable to democracy – “This is aimed at a country like Iran… so they couldn’t blackmail the free world” – the people of the Czech Republic and Poland continue to oppose the plans (as I initially reported here). Recent polls show that over 60 percent of Czechs are opposed and only 25 percent of Poles support the missile defense plan.

The mayor of the Czech village of Trokavec where the radar site would be located recently held a referendum and 71 of 72 votes were cast against the plan. The mayor of Stitov, Vaclav Hudec, and “most of” his village’s 58 residents “are bitterly opposed” to the radar site. Hudec wrote House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert Byrd outlining the opposition of “nearly two dozen” Czech mayors to the missile defense plan.

Read More Here

Thomas Grove, Reuters, Jun 8, 2007

ISTANBUL (Reuters) – The controversial author of books advocating an Islamic version of creationism claimed on Friday modern science had no monopoly on truth and insisted that his views were gaining ground.

In a bizarre news conference held aboard a luxury yacht off Istanbul’s northern Bosphorus shores near the mouth of the Black Sea, Adnan Oktar, also known by his pen-name Harun Yahya, said the evils of the world were a direct result of Darwinism.

“Communism, fascism, and Freemasons stand on the tenets of Darwinism, and the world power of capitalism stands on the same … Hitler and Mao were both Darwinists,” said Oktar, immaculately dressed in an egg-shell white suit, necktie and sporting a trim beard and combed-back hair.

“We will not deceive ourselves that scientists have a monopoly on truth,” he said.

Charles Darwin came up with the widely adopted evolutionary theory of natural selection in the 19th century.

Oktar, born in 1956, is the driving force behind a richly funded movement based in Turkey that champions creationism, the belief that God literally created the world in six days as told in the Bible and the Koran.

His teachings echo those of Christian fundamentalists in the United States, though he said he had no formal ties with them beyond “the exchange of information.”

Yahya has triggered controversy in France when his lavishly illustrated “Atlas of Creation,” which argues that Darwin’s theory of evolution is at the root of global terrorism, was mass-mailed unsolicited to educators and libraries there.

France’s Education Ministry was baffled and worried by the appearance of thousands of copies of the book, which carries over 700 pages of images comparing fossils with present-day animals to argue that Allah created all life as it is and that evolution never took place.

Read More Here

Daniel J. Callahan and Marc P. Miles, AlterNet, June 8, 2007

The following article is by the lawyers representing the families of four American contractors who worked for Blackwater and were killed in Fallujah. After Blackwater refused to share information about why they were killed, the families were told they would have to sue Blackwater to find out. Now Blackwater is trying to sue them for $10 million to keep them quiet.

Raleigh, NC — The families of four American security contractors who were burned, beaten, dragged through the streets of Fallujah and their decapitated bodies hung from a bridge over the Euphrates River on March 31, 2004, are reaching out to the American public to help protect themselves against the very company their loved ones were serving when killed, Blackwater Security Consulting. After Blackwater lost a series of appeals all the away to the U.S. Supreme Court, Blackwater has now changed its tactics and is suing the dead men’s estates for $10 million to silence the families and keep them out of court.

Following these gruesome deaths which were broadcast on worldwide television, the surviving family members looked to Blackwater for answers as to how and why their loved ones died. Blackwater not only refused to give the grieving families any information, but also callously stated that they would need to sue Blackwater to get it. Left with no alternative, in January 2005, the families filed suit against Blackwater, which is owned by the wealthy and politically-connected Erik Prince.

Blackwater quickly adapted its battlefield tactics to the courtroom. It initially hired Fred F. Fielding, who is currently counsel to the President of the United States. It then hired Joseph E. Schmitz as its in-house counsel, who was formerly the Inspector General at the Pentagon. More recently, Blackwater employed Kenneth Starr, famed prosecutor in the Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky scandal, to oppose the families. To add additional muscle, Blackwater hired Cofer Black, who was the Director of the CIA Counter- Terrorist Center.

After filing its suit against the dead men’s estates, Blackwater demanded that its claim and the families’ existing lawsuit be handled in a private arbitration. By suing the families in arbitration, Blackwater has attempted to move the examination of their wrongful conduct outside of the eye of the public and away from a jury. This comes at the same time when Congress is investigating Blackwater.

Over 300 contractors have been killed in Iraq with very little inquiry into their deaths. The families claim that Blackwater is attempting to cover up its incompetence, its cutting of corners in favor of higher profits, and its over billing to the government. Due to lack of accountability and oversight, Blackwater’s private army has been able to obtain huge profits from the government, utilizing contacts established through Erik Prince’s relationships with high-ranking government officials such as Cofer Black and Joseph Schmitz.

In addition to assembling its litigation troops, Blackwater also stonewalled the families concerning any information about how the men were killed. Over the past two and a half years, Blackwater has not responded to a single question or produced a single document. When the families’ attorneys, Callahan & Blaine, obtained a Court Order to take the deposition of a former Blackwater employee with critical information about the incident, Blackwater quickly re-hired him and sent him out of the country. When the witness returned to the United States more than a year later, the families obtained another Court Order for his deposition. Blackwater again prevented them from taking his deposition by seeking the assistance of the U.S. Attorney’s Office to block the deposition under the guise that he possibly possessed national secrets. Following an investigation, the U.S. Army reported that the witness had no secret information and that it had no objection to the deposition.

Read More Here

Paul Craig Roberts, AntiWar.com, June 6, 2007

The war in Iraq is lost. This fact is widely recognized by American military officers and has been recently expressed forcefully by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq during the first year of the attempted occupation. Winning is no longer an option. Our best hope, Sanchez says, is “to stave off defeat,” and that requires more intelligence and leadership than Sanchez sees in the entirety of our national political leadership: “I am absolutely convinced that America has a crisis in leadership at this time.”

More evidence that the war is lost arrived June 4 with headlines reporting that “U.S.-led soldiers control only about a third of Baghdad, the military said on Monday.” After five years of war the U.S. controls one-third of one city and nothing else.

A host of U.S. commanding generals have said that the Iraq war is destroying the U.S. military. A year ago Colin Powell said that the U.S. Army is “about broken.” Lt. Gen. Clyde Vaughn says Bush has “piecemealed our force to death.” Gen. Barry McCaffrey testified to the U.S. Senate that “the Army will unravel.”

Col. Andy Bacevich, America’s foremost writer on military affairs, documents in the current issue of The American Conservative that Bush’s insane war has depleted and exhausted the U.S. Army and Marine Corps:

“Only a third of the regular Army’s brigades qualify as combat-ready. In the reserve components, none meet that standard. When the last of the units reaches Baghdad as part of the president’s strategy of escalation, the U.S. will be left without a ready-to-deploy land force reserve.

“The stress of repeated combat tours is sapping the Army’s lifeblood. Especially worrying is the accelerating exodus of experienced leaders. The service is currently short 3,000 commissioned officers. By next year, the number is projected to grow to 3,500. The Guard and reserves are in even worse shape. There the shortage amounts to 7,500 officers. Young West Pointers are bailing out of the Army at a rate not seen in three decades. In an effort to staunch the losses, that service has begun offering a $20,000 bonus to newly promoted captains who agree to stay on for an additional three years. Meanwhile, as more and more officers want out, fewer and fewer want in: ROTC scholarships go unfilled for a lack of qualified applicants.”

Bush has taken every desperate measure. Enlistment ages have been pushed up from 35 to 42. The percentage of high school dropouts and the number of recruits scoring at the bottom end of tests have spiked. The U.S. military is forced to recruit among drug users and convicted criminals. Bacevich reports that wavers “issued to convicted felons jumped by 30 percent.” Combat tours have been extended from 12 to 15 months, and the same troops are being deployed again and again.

There is no equipment for training. Bacevich reports that “some $212 billion worth has been destroyed, damaged, or just plain worn out.” What remains is in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Under these circumstances, “staying the course” means total defeat.

Read More Here

Mitt Romney is running for President. Mitt Romney is a Mormon. Why should this matter to you and me? Well; of all the bullshit, religious, idiot cults Mormons seem to be the most gullible cult. Really. They believe an angel named Moroni delivered “Golden Plates” with text written in Egyptian to Joseph Smith in the 1800s. Say what??? Does anyone think this is a bit odd? And, is someone who believes that crap a person we want for a President? Reality Check. Bush (Evangelical Christian) – need I say more?

(more…)

Paul Krugman, The New York Times, June 7, 2007

In Tuesday’s Republican presidential debate, Mitt Romney completely misrepresented how we ended up in Iraq. Later, Mike Huckabee mistakenly claimed that it was Ronald Reagan’s birthday.

Guess which remark The Washington Post identified as the “gaffe of the night”?

Folks, this is serious. If early campaign reporting is any guide, the bad media habits that helped install the worst president ever in the White House haven’t changed a bit.

You may not remember the presidential debate of Oct. 3, 2000, or how it was covered, but you should. It was one of the worst moments in an election marked by news media failure as serious, in its way, as the later failure to question Bush administration claims about Iraq.

Throughout that debate, George W. Bush made blatantly misleading statements, including some outright lies — for example, when he declared of his tax cut that “the vast majority of the help goes to the people at the bottom end of the economic ladder.” That should have told us, right then and there, that he was not a man to be trusted.

But few news reports pointed out the lie. Instead, many news analysts chose to critique the candidates’ acting skills. Al Gore was declared the loser because he sighed and rolled his eyes — failing to conceal his justified disgust at Mr. Bush’s dishonesty. And that’s how Mr. Bush got within chad-and-butterfly range of the presidency.

Now fast forward to last Tuesday. Asked whether we should have invaded Iraq, Mr. Romney said that war could only have been avoided if Saddam “had opened up his country to I.A.E.A. inspectors, and they’d come in and they’d found that there were no weapons of mass destruction.” He dismissed this as an “unreasonable hypothetical.”

Except that Saddam did, in fact, allow inspectors in. Remember Hans Blix? When those inspectors failed to find nonexistent W.M.D., Mr. Bush ordered them out so that he could invade. Mr. Romney’s remark should have been the central story in news reports about Tuesday’s debate. But it wasn’t.

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