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I really wish the clowns in the GOP/Media's Gaslight Division would make up their effing minds.

As Joe Sudbay pointed out over at AmericaBlog last week:

Wait, yesterday, Bush's Homeland Security adviser said the Osama Bin Laden was "virtually impotent." Yet, today, Bush's National Intelligence Director testified that Bin Laden's forces pose a real threat. What is it? And, if we're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here, how can they still be a real threat?

And yet the press dutifully relays each new piece of spin to us without comment, much less mentioning how it contradicts the previous pieces of spin. This isn't reporting, it's stenography.

But of course it was always thus with Bush and the media.

Remember the old "flypaper" theory the Bush people and their conservative apologists used to bat around? The idea was that it was a GOOD thing that our invading Iraq had taken a nation that was previously run by a secularist guy who hated Al-Qaeda and other Islamic-based terror groups and turned it into a bloody, weltering mess of chaos, because the chaos would draw the bad guys to it and away from us. Brilliance!

Of course, what was really happening was that our invading and destroying Iraq as a functional state in a continuing occupation that's now cost over a million Iraqi dead and four million made homeless (which works out to nearly twenty percent of the pre-invasion population homeless or dead) has pissed off so many people in the developing world that they're taking up arms against us. In other words, it's not so much "flypaper" as fertilizer -- invading and occupying what used to be a country is creating more terrorists worldwide than we can shoot, bomb, or blow up.

Meanwhile, in addition to serving as terrorist fertilizer, the ongoing occupation of Iraq is putting horrific strains on our military. In fact, the real reason for Petraeus' -- and now Bush's -- promising the troop drawdown is simply because he has no other choice if he doesn't want to see a total collapse of the troops. But the Bushistas can never admit that openly.

So what do they do, now that they've destroyed one nation and are putting our own in peril? Why, they try to distract us with the Osama boogie-man -- that is, when they're not busy saying he's no longer a threat.

Sheeeeesh.