is it more like pinocchio. . . or the boy who cried wolf?

What do we call it when the puppets contradict the puppet masters?

Former interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi:

If this is not civil war, the God knows what civil war is.

Vice President Cankles:

I don’t [agree that Iraq is in a civil war]. . . . Clearly there is an attempt under way by the terrorists, by Zarqawi and others, to foment civil war. That's been their strategy all along, but my view would be they've reached a stage of desperation from their standpoint.

I guess “desperation” is the next step after “last throes” on the Cheney insurgency morbidity scale.

During his appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation, Cheney repeatedly referenced Osama bin Laden and the September 11, 2001 attacks when answering questions about the situation in Iraq. At one point, Cheney said “9/11” five times in the span of a minute.

Of course, if anomalous references to 9/11 fail to keep the home fires burning because they’ve been rammed down our throats so often that they cease to evoke enough raw emotion anymore, then, by all means, casually reference the holocaust.

Turning our backs on postwar Iraq today would be the modern equivalent of handing postwar Germany back to the Nazis.

That’s Secretary of Killing, Maiming, and Torture Donald Rumsfeld writing in Sunday’s Washington Post. Read it; from start to finish, it’s as stupid as it is offensive.