That's the headline on a new AP story.

Oh brother. The filter of his propoganda machine, maybe.

A sample from the AP story of his take on Iraq:

Bush said Iraq is a place where markets are bustling, shelves are full, oil is flowing and satellite dishes are sprouting up.

God. The man just knows no shame.

But the arrogance of this guy is what truly amazes me. He spent the past several months successfully duping the country into buying three gross distortions about Iraq, without which less than 25% of the public would have backed his bullshit war.

The docile media that helped him create those myths finally begins wising up just a little--though not clearing up their mess, as 60 percent of Americans still hold at least one of those three misconceptions--and he can't handle it.

Apparently conning a mere 60 percent of the public is just not good enough. The media refuses to completely act like his Leni Reifenshtal and he throws a little hissy fit.

Everything about this guy has always screamed entitlement. He just seems to think he was born with the divine right of destroying our country.

But those upstarts in the press insist on only parroting his lies some of the time, so he starts his own bullshit blog from hell and begins a campaign to go around the "filters." Isn't that what FauxNews if for?

Man, if you had any doubts about the integrity of the Bush presidency, just check out his blog.

Everybody is going to do some spinning of their news, but his blog is just one gross distortion after another. His people just have no integrity whatsoever, do they?

Today's swill:

A piece titled "Return of power brightens Iraqis" summarizes a USA Today piece as a gleefull story about the lights coming on in Iraq, saying how great things are now compared to pre-war Iraq.

What a crock! I guess they assume their readers are all lemmings and won't actually follow the link.

The actual story paints a much bleaker picture, with people pissed as hell that we threw the country into darkness for six straight months, and relieved that it's finally back on. The Bush blog segues into the story this way:

Written from Baghdad, a piece in today’s USA Today captures the people’s excitement as the lights come back on and the positive effects their newfound power is having on Iraq’s burgeoning economy.

But conveniently leaves out passages from the piece like this:

The lack of electricity has angered Iraqis and created problems for the U.S.-led coalition.

As for the blog spin that Iraqis are rejoicing about being better off than before, that's just pure bull. The piece actually quotes megawatt figures in question:

Power output reached 4,461 megawatts this week, exceeding the prewar level of 4,107 megawatts in February. A year ago it was 4,867 megawatts. But electricity demand is down now because many factories and businesses are closed.

So they're ahead of the period where both countries were preparing for war, but still not up to levels before it all began. All in all, pretty close, but hardly any great improvement.

And of course, the little downside: the power matters less because the economy has ground to a halt. Factories are not running, businesses shut down . . . That sounds promising.

Those Bushies. Liars, liars, liars. Yes, things apparently are starting to improve a bit--from the fire back up to the frying pan, perhaps--but this rosy picture of the country back on its feet and people dancing in the streets . . . Why don't they just level with people and admit how long it's going to take, and how damn slow and painful it's going to be.

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On a smaller front, here's the opening of his latest post:

Markets React to Jobless Claims

CBS Marketwatch is reporting that U.S. stock indexes have surged to new yearly highs after a fall in jobless claims released this morning suggest a strengthening economic recovery and better than expected third-quarter growth.

Here's the actual sentence from CBS Marketwatch: "The major U.S. stock indexes surged to new yearly highs after a fall in initial unemployment claims suggested the economic recovery may no longer be jobless and Yahoo's better than expected third-quarter report emboldened buyers."

If you know anything about the stock market, you know that earnings reports from key companies like Yahoo move the markets in big ways. That may well have had the great impact. (And the next sentence added a third reason (though it was also related to the economy).

Reminds me of the movie quote-ads, that will take a statement like, ". . . in a truly dreadful year, this is perhaps the best movie of the summer so far," and run an ad with a banner head saying, "Roger Ebert raves, 'best movie of the summer!'

At least they didn't completely distort this one. It was half true. But only half. I guess that's above average in the World of Immorality where the conservatives reside.

New New Hampshire poll out from American Research Group.

Almost no changes from last month, except Wes Clark, who inched or leapt up from 2 to 5%, depending whether you count percentage gain. It's great percentage gain, but he'll have to move up faster than that if he wants to catch the leaders

Howard Dean maintains his lead of exactly ten points on Kerry (the only place in the world Kerry has some strength). They each slipped slightly. The numbers (with September/August in parenthesis):

• Dean 29 (31/28)
• Kerry 19 (21/21)
• Lieberman 6 (5/4)
• Gephardt 6 (8/10)
• Clark 5 (2/1)
• Edwards 3 (2/2)

 The most interesting finding (directly from the ARG site):

Awareness of Wesley Clark has increased to 90% from 47% in August, but over half of likely Democratic primary voters aware of Clark say they do not know enough about him to form an opinion.

Seems like a direct communique to Clark, though he doesn't appear to be recieving that message.

Major props to the Dean campaign for reporting those results on their blog without a whiff of spin. Matter of fact, nearly their entire post came verbatim off the ARG site, including the good and the (arguably) bad. Those guys can be so damn refreshing sometimes. No wonder they're so far out in front.

And compare their approach to the propoganda from hell on the new Bush blog. (See the next post for the latest distortions.)

Update: AP now has a story up on this here.

Well, it hasn't taken the Bush blog long to start distorting.

On just Day Two, they are citing a David Brooks column in The New York Times as showing "Progress Toward a Free Iraq."

Brooks does argue that the Iraqis are making progress on a constitution, but the blog conveniently ignores the fact that Brooks also:

• Devotes half the column to a list of daunting bullet points under the heading: "Still, gigantic issues remain:"
• He concludes that gigantic list with this harsh indictiment of the Bush plan: "There's no way the Iraqis can resolve these issues within six months, the deadline Colin Powell once set."

The latter is crucial, because in essense it says: Yes, the Iraqis are doing as well as can be expected, but the Bush plan for them has proven preposterous. Brooks is patting the Iraqis on the back, but ripping Bush a new one (in an admittedly subtle way, as expected for a hardcore conservative).

All recent entries from the Bush Blogwatch here.

I realize that any blog is going to have a point of view, and a presidential blog will be particularly propogandistic, but the new Bush blog is just too much.

Titles of the last two entries:

• Progress Toward a Free Iraq
• Afghan children are laughing and learning just two years after beginning of war

The first one is laughable, the second obscene.

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I got some great comments from some of you guys on my post last night about the horrifying arrival of the Bush blog (first powerful contender for the jump-the-shark moment in the history of blogging). (And here's an ominous omen--if you click on the link and glance up at the url, you'll find that was my post #666.)

This response from Ben was particularly insightful:

Yup. Web log > blog > politblog > e-newsletter with bulletin board posting available with real-time updating 24/7.

The Blog as a media form is still in a state of evolution. Unfortunately, the Bush blog represents a species that doesn't fit Darwinian standards, let alone what the rest of the world thinks a blog should be. If Bush's intent was to be the first President to have a blog site, well, let's go call the Smithsonian. History will probably still show how Dean's use of the blog revolutionized the election process.

My response: Agreed on both. The personal voice on Dean's blog is not Dean's, but it is personal.

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(And I'm instituting a new feature here, which you'll find a link to in the left-hand sidebar: Bush Blogwatch. I'm not sure how often I'll update it. Depends how interesting and/or appalling the Bush blog becomes.)

Ugh. George Bush got a blog today. I hate to even link to it, but here it is.

I guess that makes blogs completely passe. The dork factor just soared through the roof.

So far, all they've got is Bush's schedule for today, and links to three news stories.

The real howler is that they brag about "offering the latest news and views from outside the Washington “Beltway” "--complete with annoying gratuitous quotes around beltway--and then follow immediately with stories/op-ed from the Wall Street Journal, NY Post, and W Post. So they're stretching all the way out to the heartland of NY?  To Washington correspondents for rabid-right publications in NY? Wow. No beltway mentality there.

And they start off with two pieces grasping to make their case on WMD. Pitiful.

The initial response on the Dean blog.