I’ve been opposed to President Bush’s stem cell policy — a colossal act of hypocrisy masquerading as a Solomonic compromise — since it was announced in the summer of 2001, then buried in the news avalanche of 9/11. The 2004 election has brought this issue back with a vengeance — particularly here in California, where there’s a $3 billion proposition on the ballot to set up a gigantic state-based stem cell research program.

I’d assumed I’d be voting for Prop 71, and I haven’t made up my mind one way or another yet, but I’m starting to pay attention to the growing chorus of smart people who are raising questions about the wisdom of the measure: in particular, its size, absence of safeguards and potential for conflict of interest.

Dan Gillmor, here, and Mitch Kapor, here, offer some of the arguments. Here’s an assessment by the Center for Genetics and Society. It’s easy to simply jerk one’s knee on an issue like this, and the urge to oppose the president’s intellectually short-sighted and morally indefensible policy is overwhelming. But “think before you vote” remains good advice.

The New York Times has taken a lot of lumps in the past couple years, many of them deserved. But two series in the paper over the past week demonstrate its continued ability to provide a kind of definitive depth that eludes most other media sources.

Michael Gordon’s three part series (part one, two and three) on the war in Iraq gives a military expert’s view of how the war went awry. It’s not partisan and it mostly offers the perspective of military leaders and analysts; much of the material is drawn from the people President Bush chose to lead the occupation of Iraq in its early days. It begins with General Tommy Franks in full “mission accomplished” mode, making plans to begin an American withdrawal within 60 days.

Within a few months, though, the Bush administration’s optimistic assumptions had been upended. Many of the foreign troops never came. The Iraqi institutions expected to help run the country collapsed. The adversary that was supposed to have been shocked and awed into submission was reorganizing beyond the reach of overstretched American troops. In the debate over the war and its aftermath, the Bush administration has portrayed the insurgency that is still roiling Iraq today as an unfortunate, and unavoidable, accident of history, an enemy that emerged only after melting away during the rapid American advance toward Baghdad. The sole mistake Mr. Bush has acknowledged in the war is in not foreseeing what he termed that “catastrophic success.” But many military officers and civilian officials who served in Iraq in the spring and summer of 2003 say the administration’s miscalculations cost the United States valuable momentum — and enabled an insurgency that was in its early phases to intensify and spread.

What Gordon’s series makes clear is that — putting aside the debate over weapons of mass destruction and the Bush administration’s rhetorical deceptions to shove the nation toward an ill-conceived war — the administration failed the Iraq test on the simple ground of competence. It used bad information, made bad plans, ignored good intelligence that failed to tell it what it wanted to hear, and found itself in a rapidly deteriorating military situation that it is still scratching its head over.

Then turn to today’s Times and you’ll find a lengthy piece by Tim Golden (first in a series) detailing Bush failures in the war on terrorism’s legal front. In the weeks after 9/11 Bush seized the moment to break from the American legal mainstream in the name of defending the U.S. from new attacks:

White House officials said their use of extraordinary powers would allow the Pentagon to collect crucial intelligence and mete out swift, unmerciful justice. “We think it guarantees that we’ll have the kind of treatment of these individuals that we believe they deserve,” said Vice President Dick Cheney, who was a driving force behind the policy. But three years later, not a single terrorist has been prosecuted. Of the roughly 560 men being held at the United States naval base at Guantà­¡mo Bay, Cuba, only 4 have been formally charged. Preliminary hearings for those suspects brought such a barrage of procedural challenges and public criticism that verdicts could still be months away. And since a Supreme Court decision in June that gave the detainees the right to challenge their imprisonment in federal court, the Pentagon has stepped up efforts to send home hundreds of men whom it once branded as dangerous terrorists.

Again, the conclusion is not about partisan ideology but about effectiveness: The Bush team said they needed certain powers to prosecute terrorists, but despite getting everything they asked for, they’ve failed miserably in finding and charging actual terrorists. The thread that runs through both series is how a band of ideologues seized the Bush administration’s reins after 9/11 and enacted pre-existing agendas (invade Iraq, mock international law and bolster the federal government’s power) that ended up undermining the war on al-Qaida rather than strengthening the U.S. hand.

Incompetence on the field, incompetence in the courts — it really has no end, and yet the cornerstone of the Bush campaign remains the promise that the current guys can best protect the nation. These articles are lengthy, dispassionate presentations of the factual record based largely on interviews not with critics from across the aisle but with insiders (many of them, understandably, disillusioned). I can understand that Bush supporters might not embrace the Kerry campaign’s criticisms of the president, but I wish every Bush voter would sit down and read these pieces and then see whether their man’s record matches his rhetoric of strength by any standard of reality.

UPDATE: Part two of Golden’s series is now online.

The Bush “Wolves” ad is certainly a new low, for all sorts of reasons. Here’s one: The narrator says, “In an increasingly dangerous world, even after the first terrorist attack on America, John Kerry and the liberals in Congress voted to slash America’s intelligence operations — by $6 billion — cuts so deep they would have weakened America’s defenses, and weakness attracts those who are waiting to do America harm.”

My God! Even after 9/11, those awful liberals were voting to cut intelligence? How could they? Wait, read the fine print: The vote the ad cites (with tiny-type attribution) is from 1993-4. “The first terrorist attack on America” turns out to be the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

The actual record of Kerry and those “liberals” is being misrepresented here anyway (see the facts). And Porter Goss, President Bush’s hand-picked CIA boss, proposed even bigger cuts than Kerry did, way back then.

But the larger framing of the ad is an outright, intentional deception to make viewers think that Kerry voted against intelligence funding after 9/11. It’s not subtle, or debatable, or fuzzy; it’s a blatantly bogus attempt to spread misinformation.

Since it worked with the Saddam-al Qaeda connection, I guess the Bush team feels it might work again. Have they no decency? I guess we knew the answer.

ADDENDUM: I wrote this post Friday morning but problems with my software kept the post from going live. In the interim, I note that both Josh Marshall and Slate have posted similar comments. Lies may get halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on, but in this case at least there are a lot of boots pounding the pavement.

And of course Salon’s War Room has been all over it, here (Geraldine Sealey’s commentary), here (the ad is just in time for Wolf Awareness Week!), and here (Caroline Kennedy’s comment: “I can’t believe anyone would make up their mind based on an ad showing a bunch of animals running around”).

Remember how hard President Bush tried to beat Kerry for failing to mention our brave Polish allies? Remember that Kerry tried to point out that Bush’s not-so-grand alliance is shrinking, not growing?

This, from a Q&A in the Sunday New York Times Magazine with Polish foreign minister Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz, pretty much speaks for itself:

Q: Poland’s defense minister, Jerzy Szmajdzinski, just announced plans to withdraw all 2,500 of your troops from Iraq next year. A: It is not true. Our minister of defense mentioned that we would like to end our mission at the end of 2005, but that is not the official position of the government.

And then this correction:

An interview with the foreign minister of Poland, Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz, on Page 23 of The Times Magazine today includes an outdated reference to his country’s commitment to keeping its troops in Iraq. On Friday, after the magazine had gone to press, Prime Minister Marek Belka announced that Poland would begin to withdraw troops at the beginning of 2005.

Britt Blaser’s piece on the Kerry biopic “Going Upriver” is an eloquent observation on wartime experience rooted in the writer’s own service in Vietnam. I’m not going to excerpt it here; you should really read the whole thing.

I continue to scratch my head in puzzlement over the controversy over Kerry’s innocuous comment about Mary Cheney. (For good commentary on this to date, see Salon’s piece by Dave Cullen, or Andrew Sullivan’s blog posting.)

Now William Safire is in there firing off more indiscriminate barrages in this desperate campaign maneuver to turn a simple debate point into some sort of mega-gaffe. Safire admits that Mary Cheney’s sexuality is no secret but maintains that “only political junkies knew that a member of the Cheney family serving on the campaign staff was homosexual.”

That’s beyond absurd. One does not need to be a “political junkie” to be aware of the vice presidential daughter’s preferences unless one defines “political junkie” as “someone who pays a little attention to the news.” Here’s Time’s take: “Her being gay has long been public knowledge. It is part of almost every media profile of the Cheney family, and has sometimes defined her professional life: she was the Coors Brewing Co.’s liaison to the gay community from 1994 to 2000.” Just a week before the final presidential debate, Cheney himself had thanked Edwards after Edwards mentioned her homosexuality in the vice-presidential debate. There were frequent mentions of Mary Cheney in the 2000 campaign and in the years since, pretty much any time the Bush administration’s conservative stance on gay rights came up.

The reason Mary Cheney gets mentioned a lot is probably the same reason Kerry mentioned her during the debate: It’s a reminder that, when the Bush administration sets out to deny homosexuals basic rights, some of the people whose rights they are denying are their own close kin. That’s relevant by any standard — particularly when the relative in question is someone in a political role (Mary Cheney, after all, is one of her father’s campaign managers).

Now, there are people who just don’t like this fact being mentioned. Gary Bauer ludicrously whined that Kerry’s comment was an “attempt to suppress a certain segment of Christian votes.” Notice the hysterical language: presenting a simple, undisputed public fact to the electorate is tantamount to “suppressing” votes. Giving people a reason not to vote for the other guy is the equivalent of tearing up voter registrations.

Safire calls Kerry’s comment “the lowest blow” and complains that its “sleazy” purpose was “to drive a wedge between the Republican running mates. President Bush supports a constitutional amendment limiting marriage to a union of a man and a woman; Cheney has long been on record favoring state option, but always adds that the president sets administration policy.”

Safire is an avowed libertarian who’s presumably committed to putting the most information into voters’ hands, but look at how he slips into a realm of outright anti-democratic rhetoric here: “Yes,” he in effect says, “what Kerry said about Mary Cheney is true. Yes, it is public. But for Kerry to spread that public fact to more voters is ‘sleazy’ because it highlights an instance where the administration is either divided or hypocritical or both.”

I guess we’re not allowed to do that any more. How dare the Democratic candidate try to sway voters! Bush and his surrogates show no reluctance to cobble together shadowy 30-year-old lies that they believe make their opponent look bad; but when Kerry mentions a simple fact that happens to be a little inconvenient for the president, that shows Bush up as someone whose policies don’t match the people around him, it’s a sleazy gaffe.

Life in “the reality-based community” — it’s just getting harder and harder!