The Rundown

MANIFESTO

There are three major stories making the rounds today—all of them irksome and all of them related to the overzealousness and/or incompetence of various Bushies—including the head shrub himself.

First, in the area of slavery,

The Pentagon ordered 90-day extensions Wednesday for all active-duty Army troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, stretching their overseas tours from 12 to 15 months in a move that will exert new strain on a struggling military but allow the Bush administration to continue its troop buildup in Baghdad well into next year.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates' announcement came amid expectations that the Pentagon was about to order longer tours for some units, but the new policy is a far more sweeping and drastic step, stretching deployments for more than 100,000 members of the Army.

I've said it before; I'll say it again: That's not service; that's slavery. The military has these poor bastards exactly where it wants them, and it's simply not going to let them go. Furthermore, it can't let them go given the severe drop in recruitments in both the active services and guard and reserve forces.

The Pentagon is falling all over itself, trying to say that this extension has nothing to do with the ill-fated surge. Kevin Drum pretty neatly dispels that absurd notion.

Second, we have a case of the missing e-mails.

The White House said Wednesday it had mishandled Republican Party-sponsored e-mail accounts used by nearly two dozen presidential aides, resulting in the loss of an undetermined number of e-mails concerning official White House business.

Congressional investigators looking into the administration's firing of eight federal prosecutors already had the non-governmental e-mail accounts in their sights because some White House aides used them to help plan the U.S. attorneys' ouster. Democrats were questioning whether the use of the GOP-provided e-mail accounts was proof that the firings were political.

Well, those of us of a certain age can't help but be reminded of an eighteen-and-a-half minute gap in a crucial tape recording in the 1970's. (The erasure of those 18½ minutes is a very funny story in itself as the person culpable was apparently one of the great technophobes of the twentieth century. The story also included an impossible explanation of the erasure involving the extraordinary elasticity of Rosemary Woods, Tricky Dick's sycophantic secretary.)

At any rate, e-mail doesn't disappear as readily as erased audio tape does, so the e-mails may be recovered. Josh Marshall goes so far as to suggest that the FBI's and NSA's vaunted data recovery programs get involved in recovering these "lost" communications. Needless to say, the explanation of the "loss" is really a no-brainer because this administration has hidden things time and time again. This is obviously just another example of their covert ways.

Third, the Duke lacrosse fiasco has finally ended with the assertion that those accused were the victims of a "tragic rush to accuse" by a rogue prosecutor who could be disbarred for his actions.

Golly, in the last six years, we haven't seen anything like this anywhere else, have we? Certainly not in places like Abu Ghraib, or Guantanamo, or any of the other secret "rendition" sites in the Mideast and Eastern Europe.

Like all the others who've been "rendered" by the star chamber that the Bushies call the American system of justice, the former Duke players did nothing wrong, but had to suffer through months of uncertainty and anxiety. And they'll continue to be punished for a crime they didn't commit:

The players no longer face the prospect of years behind bars. They finally have a measure of justice. They can get on with their lives. The damage, however, is done. It all brings to mind the question that former Labor secretary Raymond Donovan famously asked 20 years ago when he was acquitted of fraud and larceny charges: "Which office do I go to to get my reputation back?"

Or, as the Sage of Baltimore would have it: Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.

Ho hum. Just another day in George Bush's Amerika.