“Iraq’s once highly fragmented insurgent groups are increasingly cooperating to attack U.S. and Iraqi government targets, and steadily gaining control of more areas of the country.”

Defeatist spin from the slanted liberal media? Sorry; it’s the lead sentence of the lead story in today’s Wall Street Journal.

Back in 2001, you’ll recall — months before 9/11 — President Bush “looked into the eyes” of Russian president Vladimir Putin and told us that this was a man he could trust. Bush and Putin, the word was, had bonded — as Bush always seems to — through their mutual belief in a “Higher Power.”

Well, now we know all about the kind of higher power Putin aspires to. In a story that should, perhaps, receive at least three percent of the attention the U.S. media have devoted to the grievances of Swift Boat Veterans and the peculiarities of IBM office machines circa 1972, The Russian leader has scuttled the flimsy remnants of democracy in his country, concentrating power in his hands and returning Russia to the kind of one-party rule it had for decades under the Communists — this time with no lip service paid to Marxist theory. (In fact, a day after consolidating his power, Putin announced the formation of a humongous new Russian energy consortium open to Western investment. How convenient that he previously used the powers of his state to jail the head of Yukos, a competitor to the new energy firm, who’d begun to be active in the political opposition.) The rhetorical dressing today may be different from that in the days of Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev, but the brutal dynamics are familiar: Russia’s brief trajectory from glasnost to perestroika to democracy has now boomeranged straight back to dictatorship.

The Bush administration, for its part, is shockingly mum in the face of this globally significant event (Colin Powell has “concerns”), but that shouldn’t be a surprise. Putin may be an anti-democratic thug, but dammit, he’s our thug — a staunch ally in the War on Terror. And while Putin’s putsch is a lot more aggressive than the PATRIOT Act, Russia’s leader is cribbing from the same playbook Bush and Cheney used in the wake of 9/11: A terrorist disaster provides awfully good cover to roll out long-stewing policies (an invasion of Iraq for Bush, a suppression of democracy for Putin) that would be unpalatable except in a climate of fear and anger.

In this context, it hardly seems to matter that the awful terrorist acts confronting Putin’s Russia stem mostly from Chechen separatists and ethnic conflicts between Ingush and Ossetians (let’s hear Bush pronounce those names during the upcoming debates). So what if Russia’s “war on terror” is an entirely different conflict from the United States’ “war on terror”? Let’s roll these conflicts up, unite our enemies and delude ourselves that Russia’s decade-long war with Chechen guerrillas is morally aligned with the U.S.’s struggle against the perpetrators of 9/11. Since democracies like France, Germany and Spain can’t be lined up to support Bush’s ill-considered policies, then, hey, we’ll have to take a strongman.

As a dictator sitting on a vast reserve of oil and decaying stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, Vladimir Putin is looking more and more like a certain other Bush administration nemesis now awaiting trial in Baghdad. This time, though, it’s okay: remember, we can trust Putin — about as much as we can trust Bush.

POSTSCRIPT: President Bush has now weighed in. He is “worried,” says the AP, that Putin’s moves “could undermine democracy.” This is like saying Bush’s tax cuts “could undermine the budget surplus.” The rhetorical device of transforming a fait accompli into a vague possibility may be expedient, but it’s a pretty transparent dodge, and it effectively gives Putin a green light.

The trouble with the font debate and the Swift Boat Vets debate and all the other trivia that the Republicans have succeeded in dominating the news with — and, yes, the Bush service record trivia that the Democrats have fumblingly attempted to retort with — is that we will forget it all after November 2. It will be as irrelevant as outdated poll numbers.

What we will still be facing, whoever wins, is a situation abroad that gets worse by the week and an economy at home that’s sputtering. For all the commander-in-chief bravado and the rhetoric of decisiveness, President Bush has managed to distract the nation from the essential rudderlessness of his leadership. In his four years of running the country, he has majored in punting problems, fudging outcomes and delaying reckonings.

This is the Bush administration’s principal behavior pattern, its fundamental survival principle, one no doubt etched into Karl Rove’s DNA: Do whatever it takes to run the clock out. The pattern established itself, of course, in the fiasco of the Florida vote recount. It emerged in controversies as diverse as Dick Cheney’s fight to keep the doors of his energy commission closed and the pseudo-Solomonic “compromise” over stem-cell research. It’s profoundly evident in Bush economic policy, with its bogus “expiring” tax cuts designed to loot the Treasury as quickly as possible without scaring people over the resulting national bankruptcy. And it is the blueprint for how Bush’s team duped the nation into the Iraq war with a barrage of misinformation: They said whatever they had to in order to rally public support up until the launch of the invasion, when they could count on a support-our-boys dynamic to kick in.

The other part of the Bush modus operandi is, take irrevocable steps. The Bush administration has already made havoc of our fiscal health, our national defense and our hope of actually prevailing in the struggle against radical Islam. Much of what it has done can’t be undone. Short-term thinking — what do we have to do to get through the next election? — has made long-term trouble.

A small and spiteful part of me can’t help thinking, “Let Bush win — let him deal with his own mess!” Except there is no indication that a second-term Bush will take any more ownership of his messes than a first-term Bush. This, perhaps, is the ultimate irony of the Bush presidency: For all the campaign-biography mythos of a misspent youth redeemed by Jesus and a sober adulthood, George W. Bush is using the presidency to play out his own drama of irresponsibility on a nation-size stage. Once a wastrel, always a wastrel.

Bonus link: If you are still harboring any doubts about just how strategically stupid the Iraq invasion was, read Juan Cole’s essay on al-Qaida’s war aims.

As we continue to sift through the spotty record of George Bush’s military service, it’s good to keep in mind the point Josh Marshall makes: “This isn’t about what President Bush did 30+ years ago. Or at least it’s not primarily about that. The issue here is that for a decade President Bush has been denying all of these things. He did so last January. He did so again as recently as last month. He’s continued to cover this stuff up right from the Oval Office.”

Or, as our Eric Boehlert puts it, “The controversy, after all, is not merely about how he received a million dollars’ worth of free pilot training and then stiffed the government when it came time to pay it back in service. It’s also about how, for the last decade, Bush and his advisors have done everything possible to distort, if not erase, the truth about Bush’s service record in order to advance his political career.”

Now we have a flood of new jigsaw puzzle pieces, including this strange one from May 19, 1972, in which Bush’s Texas commander writes: “Physical. We talked about him getting his flight physical situation fixed before his date. Says he will do that in Alabama if he stays in flight status. He has this campaign to do and other things that will follow and may not have the time. I advised him of our investment in him and his commitment. He’s been working with staff to come up with options and identified a unit that may accept him. I told him I had to have written acceptance before he would be transferred, but think he’s also talking to someone upstairs.” Another memo records a direct order to Bush to take the physical.

Now, I’ll accept that young Bush was a busy guy, with political campaigns to run and parties to attend — but here he is, he’s been in the Guard for four years, what’s the big deal about a physical? How long does it take, an afternoon? Why was it so important to him not to undergo this routine procedure?

I’m afraid this is the sort of query that leads one toward that other swamp of evasion in the Bush record — those questions about his alleged drug use that have always been answered with nods, winks, comments about having been “young and irresponsible” and denials of drug use carrying carefully crafted expiration dates. Earlier this year, Boehlert reported on the strange coincidence that Bush’s Guard disappearing act almost exactly coincided with the institution of random drug testing for military personnel: “At the time when Bush, perhaps for the first time in his life, faced the prospect of a random drug test, his military records show he virtually disappeared, failing for at least one year to report for Guard duty.”

The odds of our ever knowing the truth about that aspect of Bush’s life are even worse than the odds of our getting his service record clear. And bringing the issue up without knowing the truth is not the sort of thing that makes anyone feel good: Who did or didn’t inhale (or snort) three decades ago ought to be covered by veils of privacy and statutes of limitation.

But decorum feels like surrender in this mad electoral fight. The Bush campaign has gone completely off the rails in its smears of Kerry’s service record. Even if you don’t want to consider the facts and just look at the charges, there’s no equivalency here between the issues under dispute. In one case, we’re arguing over how serious a guy’s battlefield wounds were; in the other, we’re weighing whether to call absenteeism and cover-ups by their proper names. What a falling-off!

It may be ugly, it’s certainly no one’s idea of what this country should be talking about during this election, but with the whirlwind of attention on his military record Bush is reaping what his August barrage against Kerry’s record sowed. It’s rough justice.

In his address to the Republican convention last night, Zell Miller showed he is no democrat. That’s a lower-case “d”: I’m not talking about the political party Miller, a Georgia senator, nominally belongs to. I mean that Miller doesn’t seem to understand the simple basics of our system of government.

Salon’s Tim Grieve has already taken apart the distortions of fact in Miller’s (and other) convention speeches. (Those weapons systems he complains Kerry opposed? Then-defense secretary Dick Cheney questioned them, too.) And Miller’s rhetorical question, “Where is the bipartisanship in this country when we need it most?” should rightly be addressed to President Bush, who, in the days after 9/11, stood astride the most unprecedented swell of bipartisanship in decades — and then squandered it on narrow, extremist policies, dirty-pool politics and a divisively launched and incompetently executed war in Iraq.

No, I want to talk about this sentence in Miller’s speech: “Today, at the same time young Americans are dying in the sands of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, our nation is being torn apart and made weaker because of the Democrats’ manic obsession to bring down our commander in chief.”

Strip this of its spin and modifiers and what Miller is saying is, “While Americans are dying, the opposition party is trying to win the election, and that hurts the nation.”

Well, what does Miller suggest Americans do who honestly believe that George Bush is making disastrous mistakes at home and abroad? Grin and bear it and fall in line — because, hey, he is the commander in chief? The very fact that “young Americans are dying” — many of whom very likely did not have to be dying — is what fires up much of the opposition to the president. But Miller thinks that if soldiers are dying, the essential work of democracy — endorsing our leaders or replacing them if we think they’re screwing up — must halt.

Note the militarism here. Forget that our Constitution puts the civilian authority in charge of the military; in Miller’s rhetoric, “commander in chief” trumps “president.” And dissent equals insubordination.

Miller’s speech goes on to declare, “It is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us the freedom of the press. It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech. It is the soldier, not the agitator, who has given us the freedom to protest.”

I’m sorry, senator, but you couldn’t be more wrong. (And every Republican who applauded you needs a remedial civics class). It is the U.S. constitution that bestows these freedoms. Executives and legislators sometimes try to abridge them. Soldiers, for the most part, protect them. But from the time of the nation’s Founding Fathers on, American leaders, thinkers and citizens have been conscious of the tension between our cherished civil freedoms and the logic of warfare. Waging war demands sacrifice and obedience — and compromises freedom. And so democracies rightly and appropriately go to war reluctantly, and voters demand that their leaders show that there is no alternative to fighting.

Oh, right, that’s why we’re having an election-year debate about a “war of choice” in the first place.

I can’t imagine anyone watching Miller’s frothing speech and feeling reassured about the direction Bush is taking us. It was an outburst of intimidation, intended to cow. Dave Winer heard the jackboots behind it: “Why was the Miller speech so scary? Answer — you’re next. That’s what Miller was saying. After this election we put on the brown shirts.” That may be a little over the top, but the fact that’s it’s only a little over the top is itself chilling. Josh Marshall heard the same noise, just a little more muted: “This whole confab has been built around militarism, the seductions of the mentality of siege and insecurity both from without and within, and the sort of no-rules-win-at-all-costs-lie-if-it-works mentality that will lead this nation to grief.”

There is no Bush administration record to run on: At home they’ve raided the treasury and looted the future of Social Security for tax cuts for the rich, and abroad they’ve squandered the support of the world and bungled the war on the perpetrators of 9/11. All the Republicans can do — as we’ve seen this week –is attack, attack, attack. They’re trying to plant a little seed of terror in each voter’s mind, hoping to immobilize the opposition and persuade the undecided that they don’t dare hope for anything better. Scariest of all is that it has a chance of working.

If you’re obsessing over the election, this site offers a pretty addictive experience. Sure, it’s not able to weight polls by reliability, and given how much of this election remains within the margin of error its definitiveness is entirely an illusion. But it’s a fun way of focusing on what — as we learned in 2000 — really matters in close U.S. elections: how the states fall.

President Bush continues to point his finger at 527 organizations — independent, tax-exempt political activist groups that are not supposed to coordinate their work with the candidates’ campaigns. Bush won’t condemn the toxic slurry-dump of the Swift Boat Veterans group’s TV ad campaign; instead, he insists, everyone should repudiate all “shadowy” 527 groups equally.

You can find the heart of the president’s subterfuge in that tenebrous adjective. Shadowy, of course, is bad. Shadowy is covert. Shadowy is dark. Shadowy is scary. Shadowy is al-Qaida.

Bush wants us to associate these qualities with all 527s. But the charge doesn’t stick. Certainly, it’s fair to apply it to the Swift Boat Veterans group, which emerged out of nowhere, fired its fusillade against John Kerry, and only then began to be exposed as an entity funded and organized by close associates (and in some cases actual officials) of the Bush campaign.

That qualifies as “shadowy” in my book. But the most prominent 527 on the other side of the political field is MoveOn.org — and calling MoveOn “shadowy” is absurd. The group is the very model of a transparent organization. Its every decision is planned and vetted openly online. Its sources of funding are well-known. Its history dating back to the Clinton impeachment saga is fully chronicled. If the Swift Boat Veterans group were a true grassroots operation with a track record like MoveOn’s, we wouldn’t be having this argument today: If millions of Americans were genuinely outraged about John Kerry’s war record the way millions of MoveOn supporters are outraged about George Bush’s presidential record, Kerry would never have made it to the primaries’ starting gate.

But the Swift Boat Veterans aren’t a mass movement, they’re a political dirty trick. And the immediate issue with them — the reason people are demanding that Bush repudiate them — is not that they’re a 527. The problem is that the group’s charges are false.

There’s a legitimate debate worth having over whether 527s represent a good or a bad thing in the McCain-Feingold campaign finance era. But the Bush campaign isn’t truly interested in that issue. Having surreptitiously and effectively launched a smear campaign against its opponent from the cover of a 527 organization, the Bush team now petulantly insists, “Everybody does it and everybody should stop!” The childishness of the tactic speaks for itself.

It feels more than a little surreal, rejoining the news after a week off the grid. I seem to have returned to an alternate universe in which the Democrats’ war-hero candidate has been put on the defensive by the Republicans’ Guard-duty-shirking president thanks to a patently false television ad. The economy wheezes on, the situation in Iraq continues to deteriorate, but — thanks to deft work by the Bush family smear machine — the top political story is, what did or didn’t happen on a Vietnamese river three decades ago?

No one should question for a second the effectiveness of this Bush tactic. It is precisely what has worked for Bush campaigns past (vide Dukakis/Willie Horton, or the anti-McCain blitz in South Carolina 2000), and there is every sign it is working again.

Josh Marshall accurately, I think, identifies the (crudely but aptly labeled) “bitch-slap” psychodynamics of the Swift Boat Veterans story: Facts are nearly irrelevant here; this is about punching John Kerry and seeing whether he punches back, and how hard. If he fails to punch back, he’s exposed as a sissy who’s not tough enough to defend America. If he does fight back, the Bushies simply point at him — as they have already begun to — and claim that he’s lost it, he’s “wild-eyed” and unreliable and unfit to be president.

It’s exactly what every Democratic strategist knew was coming. It’s cunning, and inevitable, and low. And I think the only answer for the Kerry campaign is to call Bush out, directly, on its lowness. The trouble, of course, is that as long as you’re responding to fraudulent Swift Boat Veteran ads you’re allowing Bush to dominate the agenda. You need to punch back hard, and only then move on.

George Bush is acting like a latter-day Joseph McCarthy — albeit one smart enough to use shadowy surrogates for his dirty work and retain semi-plausible deniability. So the best way to stop him, I’m convinced, is to stand up and call out his campaign’s slime for what it is. (The new Kerry TV ad, “Old Tricks,” begins to take on this job.)

McCarthyism was stopped dead in its tracks on June 9, 1954, exactly half a century ago, when a lawyer named Joseph Welch turned on the Red-baiting senator with a withering, “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” Welch had finally said out loud what a lot of people had long been thinking about McCarthy.

Today’s media-saturated environment is different; nothing is left unsaid for very long, and what matters is what gets repeated most often. Still, it seems to me that John Kerry’s best plan is to find and deploy the 2004 equivalent of Welch’s retort. Have you no decency, George Bush, at long last?