Reality Still Stranger Than Fiction

Well, except for David Lynch movies and William Faulkner novels, of course.

* Dick Cheney's "former" company Halliburton really does have its fingers in the Mars-exploration business. Joe Conason (Salon.com 01/12/04) and Billmon (01/12/04) have the skinny.

* The (rhetorical) long knives are already out for Paul O'Neill. Our lazy press played up his gossipy characterization of Bush as ditzy. But the more serious charge has to do with how Bush and Rummy seemed committed to war against Iraq from the day they took office. Whatever the details, the daily casualty reports give that story continuing force. And the fact that the White House instantly launched an investigation of the leak of a confidential Treasury Dept. document that showed up on a news show about O'Neill's charges serves to highlight how little interested the Administration has been in finding the source of the far more serious Valerie Plame leak.

* The San Francisco Chronicle has a good editorial summarizing recent reports on the non-existent Iraqi WMDs: Selling of a War 10/13/04. As long as the casualty reports keep coming in from Iraq daily, this issue also will not die. From the editorial:

"INTELLIGENCE gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised," said President Bush in a national address on March 17, 2003.

A majority of Americans believed him. In fact, more than half the public thought that Saddam Hussein not only had close links with al Qaeda terrorist networks, but had a role in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

But it was not true. The Bush administration used innuendo and exaggerated evidence to persuade the American people that a pre-emptive war against Iraq was necessary to protect the nation from terrorism.