The Republicans are leaning hard on their corporate buddies in the media to refuse to run an ad the Democratic Party has come up with. According to the AP, the ad "sharply questions Bush's veracity on Iraq's weapons."

Gosh, that’s so terribly unfair of the Democrats. I mean, aside from the fact that the weapons didn’t, er, quite exist, actually, and aside from the fact we’re pretty much stuck in Iraq, with no clearly defined goals and no exit strategy, and the poor bastards who went over there because Putsch told them it was the right thing to do can only hope they don’t get taken out by a road bomb.

The Republicans claim the ad is misleading because it forgets to mention that the intelligence on the so-called "Niger memo" which claimed Saddam was attempting to buy yellowcake uranium radioactives to make into nuclear weapons came from British intelligence. It’s not Putsch’s fault that he’s an incompetent fuck up; his buddy Tony gave him bad info, is all.

Incidently, Tony, currently hiding in Japan, has a few problems of his own. Debate over the intelligence used to justify the attack on Iraq has reached a point there where one central character in their own "he lied" drama, a Doctor David Kelly, turned up dead the other day, an apparent suicide, and the government and the BBC are having a historic face-off over who was lying and about what. (It wasn’t all that long ago that I would get whines from right wingers that the BBC wasn’t a reliable source of information because it was "owned by the government." They’ve been conspicuously silent about that lately.) Tony’s support in the polls has dropped from near 90% to just 31%, an astounding fall for one of the most intelligent and charismatic leaders Britain has ever had.

Maybe mentioning that the intelligence came from England isn’t such a good idea, Republicans. It looks like that isn’t enough to make it more credible than good old fashioned American intelligence, the stuff that made Santa Claus a classified item and mislaid the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia, a clumsy thing to do when you’re dropping bombs in the area.

Poor Putschie. He just got bad information, is all. And you can’t expect the President to take responsibility for what he says in the State of the Union Address. Except the White House website still has a photo up showing a pair of hands with a dark blue suit and white cuffs with big gold "W" cufflinks working on a draft of the speech. The caption is that "President Bush prepared for the speech, going over it word by word, and line by line." Putsch is in charge, except of course, for when he isn’t.

Funny thing about that photo. The hands are far skinnier, paler, and have more liver-spots then you would expect from a 50-something man in good health. In fact, they looked like Donald Rumsfeld’s hands, which would explain a lot.

Republicans, of course, are experts on when it’s appropriate to lie, and when it isn’t. For example, it’s appropriate to lie to lead the nation into another Vietnam quagmire. It isn’t appropriate to lie about a consensual affair with a woman.

It’s appropriate to lie in advertising – they supported Nike in Nike’s claim that they have a first amendment right to lie in their ads and were disappointed when the SC said they didn’t – but it’s not ok to lie in, er, advertising. At least, advertising for the Democrats.

According to the AP article, that’s exactly what they were saying. "‘You can say whatever you want in a fund-raiser,’ Republican spokesman Jim Dyke said, ‘but it steps over the line when you knowingly mislead people in your advertising.’"

OK. It’s ok to lie in fund raisers, but not advertising. Except they still howl about statements attributed to Gore in fund raisers. Apparently it’s ok to lie in fund-raisers as long as they aren’t Democratic fund-raisers.

Apparently it’s OK to lie in the State of the Union address. Maybe Republicans just view it as a kind of a glorified fund-raiser. It must have really pissed them off that they could never catch Clinton lying in his SOTUs. But Putsch didn’t LIE, exactly. He was just raising money, so therefore it wasn’t a lie. Commercial speech is above such concepts as truth or falsity.

And some people don’t think our system of legalized bribery hasn’t led to a more evolved consciousness! Shame on them! What reactionary bourgeois oldthink!

The mass media (a wholly-owned subsidiary of America, Incorporated) have been urging the Democrats to attack Putsch on the economy, saying he’s weak there, and knowing that the GOP can make millions of promises they have no intention of keeping (it’s ok; they’re lying for profit and power, which is good) and spend money into propagandizing people into thinking, once again, that if they give all their money to the rich, the rich will feel grateful and take good care of them.

It may be that Putsch will be vulnerable on the economy. Despite various assurances from fat cats, it doesn’t appear to be getting better.

But the Democrats are attacking Putsch for lying us into a pointless, bloody, and purposeless war, and I’m proud of them for finally doing so.

We’ll hear warnings from Safire and Limbaugh and Wills and the various other creatures of the right, warning that the Democrats are surely committing suicide, and will end up being associated with the hippy peaceniks of the 1960s and 1970s (hoping that nobody will stop to think that the people who opposed the war in Vietnam were right, too).

As soon as Republicans start bleating that Democrats are committing suicide, self-destructing, and playing into their hands, you know they are on the run.

It’ll be interesting to see if our bankrupt corporate media allows these ads to run. In the old United States, there would have been no question. In the Brave New World of Putsch...well, we’ll see.

But the Democrats are on the attack, and people are listening. And the reason for it is simple.

Putsch lied. And people died.