David Froomkin’s special column in the Washington Post is a must-read, full of excellent invective, highlighting the hypocrisy of this generous and selfless act on the part of a president who still bikes, works out, goes on vacation more than any president in history, and has no trouble sleeping nights. And also, Keith Olbermann’s latest Special Comment is absolutely right on the mark. His analysis is thoughtful, provocative, and a must-watch. He doens’t even stoop to the low level—as well he could have done—of playing that idiotic clip of Bush saying “I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers. Thank you. Now watch this drive.”

Mr. Bush, I hate to break it to you, six-and-a-half years after you yoked this nation and your place in history to the wrong war, in the wrong place, against the wrong people but the war in Iraq is Not. About. You.

Crooks and Liars has a full transcript plus downloadable video, or just watch the YouTube version:

Part 1:

Part 2:

• Sometimes I think my viola-playing belongs in the Really Terrible Orchestra.
• Microsoft executives are not surprised to learn how awful Windows Vista really is.
• Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman to be nominated for Vice President and current Clinton hench-person, believes that Obama has got this far only because he’s a black man.
• Some amusing British humour about the U.S. presidential election.
• Required reading: Daniel Gordis’s most recent dispatch regarding how Hayyim Nachman Bialik would be mortified by the State of Israel today.
• Iraq really didn’t have WMDs—can you friggin’ believe it?
• Chris Beam’s excellent insight that the Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal is more likely to harm the Democratic Party than Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.

Now I can close all those tabs, and Firefox can stop memory-leaking (ha). Hat-tips all round.

Saddam Hussein let the world think he had weapons of mass destruction to intimidate Iran and prevent the country from attacking Iraq, according to an FBI agent who interviewed the dictator after his 2003 capture.

According to a CBS report, Hussein claimed he didn’t anticipate that the United States would invade Iraq over WMD, agent George Piro said on “60 Minutes,” scheduled for Sunday broadcast.

“For him, it was critical that he was seen as still the strong, defiant Saddam. He thought that (faking having the weapons) would prevent the Iranians from reinvading Iraq,” said Piro.

Kind of like Israel, but in reverse, I guess—trying to make a deterrent out of making everybody think you have WMDs when you actually don’t.

The report will show up on tonight’s 60 Minutes, but I plan to be watching the rebroadcast of the 2008 U.S. figure skating championships, which will be sure to hold my interest for much longer, for two (related) reasons. One, who the hell remembers or cares about weapons of mass destruction? WMDs as a justification for war with Iraq went out of fashion about six months after the invasion, when none were found. At that point, it became all about turning Iraq into a democracy, ending the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, and other reasons that seemed to come out of the blue. So I have to wonder how much impact this is going to have on either the political policy or the public consciousness of the United States. (Though I might look for Bush to throw in a veiled dig or two at this report in tomorrow night’s State of the Union speech). And second, this report doesn’t change anything: Hussein was already executed back in 2006, the U.S. military is still bogged down in a war in Iraq with no end in sight, and at this point what does it matter whether the initial justification was right or not? Not that it would have changed anything back during the run-up to the war years ago anyway…

Update: Think Progress has a video and transcript of the original interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes here.

Matt McLauchlen … spent months in military hospitals after a rocket explosion in Iraq almost severed his spinal cord and caused permanent disabilities. When he told a colonel he was so depressed that he had smoked marijuana, commanders at Camp Pendleton sent him to court martial—and discharged him with only partial benefits.

This is only one example: the news item is full of other half-forgotten soldiers: remembered long enough to get kicked out of the armed forces and denied their rightful benefits. Veterans’ groups have been trying to raise awareness of this issue, but their efforts have only accomplished so much. And of course the U.S. government had nothing to say about it on or even off the record.

The Vietnam War and the first Gulf War rightly focussed attention on the realities of PTSD and ultimately turned it into a recognised medical condition. Treatments exist to help those it affects. So why aren’t they getting to those soldiers who need them? Why are Iraq and Afghanistan veterans denied their rights to help? Unfortunately this is yet another item on a long list of things the Bush administration needs to be held accountable for, and it’s probably not very high up on that list priority-wise. But just take a listen to the NPR story linked above: would that more media outlets still possessed that sense of journalistic integrity and passion.