Fold/Spindle/Mutilate 2.1

The latest dirty blows are a contemptible one-two combination with which Team Bush has portrayed John Kerry as both the enemy of God and, if not exactly the ally of al-Qaida, then at least the terrorists’ candidate of choice. To hear them tell it, a vote for Kerry is a vote against God and Country. Talk about hitting way, way below the belt.

Let’s start with God.

It was revealed last week that the Republican Party has sent out an incendiary mass mailing warning that, if elected, “liberals” (and I’ll give you one guess which presidential candidate that includes) will try to — I kid you not — ban the Bible.

This may simply be an accentuation of the anybody-but-George vote in the United States raised to a global level and magnified. Because we Americans live in our own off-planet bubble, we have at best only a partial sense of exactly how much dismay, puzzlement, and anger has built up globally around Bush administration policies and George’s own person — and how much this has affected views of the United States. In Egypt, for instance, “just two years ago, Zogby [International] found that 76 percent of Egyptians had an unfavorable impression of the US. Today, that number is 98 percent.” On a planet never lacking in at least a modest percentage of “don’t knows,” such figures are unheard of.

Little by little, day-by-day, being based in Iraq has defied all those reasons. I am house bound. I leave when I have a very good reason to and a scheduled interview. I avoid going to people’s homes and ever walk in the streets. I can’t go grocery shopping any more, can’t eat in restaurants, can’t strike a conversation with strangers, can’t look for stories, can’t drive in any thing but a full armored car, can’t go to scenes of breaking news stories, can’t be stuck in traffic, can’t speak English outside, can’t take a road trip, can’t say I’m an American, can’t linger at checkpoints, can’t be curious about what people are saying, doing, feeling. And can’t and can’t. There has been one too many close calls, including a car bomb so near our house that it blew out all the windows. So now my most pressing concern every day is not to write a kick-ass story but to stay alive and make sure our Iraqi employees stay alive. In Baghdad I am a security personnel first, a reporter second.

It’s hard to pinpoint when the ‘turning point’ exactly began. Was it April when the Fallujah fell out of the grasp of the Americans? Was it when Moqtada and Jish Mahdi declared war on the U.S. military? Was it when Sadr City, home to ten percent of Iraq’s population, became a nightly battlefield for the Americans? Or was it when the insurgency began spreading from isolated pockets in the Sunni triangle to include most of Iraq? Despite President Bush’s rosy assessments, Iraq remains a disaster. If under Saddam it was a ‘potential’ threat, under the Americans it has been transformed to ‘imminent and active threat,’ a foreign policy failure bound to haunt the United States for decades to come.

Readers of any nailbiting story from Iraq in a major mainstream newspaper must often wonder what the dispassionate reporter really thinks about the chaotic situation there, and what he or she might be saying in private letters or in conversations with friends back home.

Now, at least in the case of Wall Street Journal correspondent Farnaz Fassihi, we know.

A lengthy letter from Baghdad she recently sent to friends “has rapidly become a global chain mail,” Fassihi told Jim Romenesko on Wednesday after it was finally posted at the Poynter Institute’s Web site. She confirmed writing the letter.

“Iraqis say that thanks to America they got freedom in exchange for insecurity,” Fassihi wrote (among much else) in the letter. “Guess what? They say they’d take security over freedom any day, even if it means having a dictator ruler.” And: “Despite President Bush’s rosy assessments, Iraq remains a disaster. If under Saddam it was a ‘potential’ threat, under the Americans it has been transformed to ‘imminent and active threat,’ a foreign policy failure bound to haunt the United States for decades to come.”

INNEBAGO, Neb.

PROGRESS has a way of backfiring on the Winnebago tribe of Nebraska. Over the past decade tribal businesses have flourished where poverty had long been the rule. Many of the 2,600 people living amid the rolling green and tan fields of the 120,000-acre Winnebago Indian Reservation have found jobs and begun to make decent money. But some of those same people, finding that their higher incomes made them ineligible for public housing, ended up leaving the reservation because there was no place else there for them to live.

The tribe’s most prominent business leader, Lance Morgan, figured it would literally take a new village to bring the tribe together again.

So far, Ho-Chunk Village, just north of town, is a mostly blank slate on which the tribe maps its destiny. A grid of chalk-colored streets is forming on a 38-acre slope of oat grass. Besides an office building and a new Dollar General store near the main road, there are 4 houses at the property’s back edge, the first of 110 planned.

“Our original theory was, hey, let’s fight the poverty in this community,” said Mr. Morgan, a thickset 36-year-old with an adolescent brightness about him. “If we fought poverty, then everything would take care of itself.” It did not work out that way.

Since 1994 Mr. Morgan has been chief executive of Ho-Chunk Inc., which the tribe chartered to diversify its economy beyond a modest casino. Today the company includes construction, retail and banking businesses. Tribal unemployment has dropped to 24 percent, from 66 percent in 1998. But a severe housing shortage began to splinter the tribe.

Steve Brozak is running for Congress in New Jersey against George W. Bush. Sure, his opponent on the ticket is Republican incumbent Mike Ferguson. But as Brozak sees it, Ferguson is just a synecdoche for the Bush team, whose failings drove Brozak out of the Marines and the Republican Party and into the first political campaign of his life.

“The bottom line is I’m going to take him down,” Brozak says of Ferguson. “I’m just going to keep hitting at him. This is a national race because I’m going to start hitting not just him but his boss. They lied to us, they misled us about what was at stake in the war with Iraq, and they’re misleading us about what is going to happen going forward.”

A candidate who has actually served in the Middle East during the Iraq war, Brozak has seen the quagmire up close. A dark-haired, broad-shouldered man, he has a deep, authoritative voice and enunciates crisply — it’s easy to imagine him in uniform, barking orders. When he speaks of the Bush administration, though, it’s with the stunned incredulousness of one who’s seen all his assumptions about the world upended. Before the war, Brozak says, he wanted to believe his president. It barely occurred to him not to. Now, his voice gets heated when he talks about Iraq, which is the subject he talks about most. “There were no weapons of mass destruction,” he says. “There was no planning, just this sense of arrogance and contempt by the civilians in this administration.”

Running in an affluent, solidly Republican district — one that Bush carried over Gore in 2000 — Brozak is making this race a referendum on the president’s handling of the war. Like many Democrats, he believes Iraq is so self-evidently catastrophic that it’s only a matter of time before people across the political spectrum wake up and realize it. He attacks Ferguson as a “water boy” for Bush and mocks him for putting color-coded terror alerts on his Web site.

The Bush administration is dead set on encouraging American citizens to believe that having an abortion can lead to breast cancer, that abstinence is the only way to prevent sexually transmitted diseases, and that the verdict is still out on global warming.

These are just a few of the notions that the Bush administration has promoted by stripping out facts that disprove those theories from documents produced by such federally funded agencies as the National Cancer Institute, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Environmental Protection Agency.

If this kind of ideological takeover of public policy makes you see red, imagine how the nation’s scientists feel. Bush hasn’t just figuratively kicked them out of the Oval Office, he’s literally done it: demoting his own top science advisor and moving the Office of Science and Technology right out of the White House.

Politicians have always been choosy about what they want to believe, for purposes of playing to their constituencies, but this administration has set a new standard, says Margaret A. Hamburg, M.D. Having worked under both Democratic and Republican administrations, Hamburg has served in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and was the commissioner of health for the city of New York.

“We’ve seen the intrusion of ideology much more forcefully into policies and programs,” she says. “In biomedical research, healthcare services, public health, but also across a range of other domains — environment, agriculture, education, missile defense — you can see this intrusion of political philosophy into the evaluation and application of science.”

A growing number of career professionals within national security agencies believe that the situation in Iraq is much worse, and the path to success much more tenuous, than is being expressed in public by top Bush administration officials, according to former and current government officials and assessments over the past year by intelligence officials at the CIA and the departments of State and Defense.

While President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others have delivered optimistic public appraisals, officials who fight the Iraqi insurgency and study it at the CIA and the State Department and within the Army officer corps believe the rebellion is deeper and more widespread than is being publicly acknowledged, officials say.

People at the CIA “are mad at the policy in Iraq because it’s a disaster, and they’re digging the hole deeper and deeper and deeper,” said one former intelligence officer who maintains contact with CIA officials. “There’s no obvious way to fix it. The best we can hope for is a semi-failed state hobbling along with terrorists and a succession of weak governments.”

“Things are definitely not improving,” said one U.S. government official who reads the intelligence analyses on Iraq.