It's been some days since all those British fellows were arrested for their plot to blow ten US-bound airplanes out of the sky. As mentioned elsewhere, the spin from the administration is that this shows that we ought to be at war and occupying Muslim countries, to force them to have some sort of democracy. If we prevail we'll all be safe, as such young men will then participate in the political process and feel no need to commit mass murder. They can run for office instead, or work for the politician of their choice. And they'll be angry no more. Or so goes the theory, for which there is little proof. How could there be? The projects in Iraq and Afghanistan aren't exactly going swimmingly. Proof of the theory will come much later, if ever. It's an if-then conditional argument, and getting the "if" set up - the free, open and secular democracies where there are gentlemanly debates and compromises worked out in some sort of congress or parliament by elected and sensible officials - is a real bitch of a job. But it should all work out that way.

And that's the line from the White House and "Zell" Lieberman. Anyone who doesn't support the global war on terror - remaking the Middle East by regime change and occupation - is missing the point. These guys with the liquid explosives and black hearts would not exist in the new world they envision. They'd be pussycats, or at least political operatives who want power and influence, and really don't feel any need to kill anyone.

So the logic goes this way - if you think these preemptive wars we're waging are doing more harm than good, then you're really supporting the angry young British Muslim men with the bombs. You're encouraging mass murder. You must hate America, and hate democracy.

Yes, it's a stretch, but that the spin. It requires that you trust the general theory is sound, without evidence, which cannot be provided at the moment.

Some buy it, but it may be that more and more people are finding it somewhere between, on one end, a little too abstract, and on the other, rather loony. To deal with those folks the theory will be repeated again and again, and reported in the media endlessly. Just keep saying it and people will become exhausted and indifferent and decide it's true. Why fight it? Yeah, whatever, George.

But there's a cool subset of this - the contention that the British arrests prove that we need programs like the illegal wiretapping and further prove that the press has been irresponsible by reporting about such illegal secret programs. That too is being repeated endlessly on the right - see Glenn Greenwald here for all the citations. If we and the Brits hadn't broken the silly laws thousands would be dead again. So there>!

The problem is it's just not true. As reported here in the Washington Post (and elsewhere), all the wire taps and looking into banking transactions were done here using FISA warrants and, in the UK, using warrants signed off by the Home Secretary. They followed the law and still got the job done.

Even Bill O'Reilly on Fox News admitted that - he just added that the warrants used in this case really didn't prove anything. We still need to cede the president the right to violate any laws he chooses. That's the only way to keep America safe, and we all love America, don't we? So this was just a bad example, or something. It still proved the point, sort of. You just never know - bypassing the warrants might have been good too, even better.

So the British and the Americans followed the laws of their respective countries that require warrants - and the terrorist plot using telephones and bank transfers was foiled. And also note this was long after it was "revealed" in the traitorous press that our government was tracking communications and financial transactions. The second part of the argument - that the press undermined our war on the bad guys by reporting there were such programs - is similarly odd. The facts show otherwise. Not that this matters very much. That argument lives on too.

All this is very odd. The facts undermine the arguments here, but if you think about it, the facts don't matter. The larger theory must be true.

One wonders how long this sort of reasoning can go - on using legal means supports the president's absolute need to use illegal methods to stop terrorist attacks - but then the American people seem to want to live in an authoritarian state. Or many of them do. Oh well.

In any event, this was big victory for the Bush administration, or so the spin goes.

But there's this from "tristero" (actually a composer whose works are performed by orchestras worldwide, Richard Einhorn) -

… as I see it, without a doubt the most bizarre aspect of the 9/11 attacks were not that they were imagined and plotted but that they actually happened. Even assuming an incompetent CIA and FBI, there were many, many signs that summer and fall that something was up (start with the 9/11 commission report and work your way through Pretext to War, The One Percent Doctrine, and a slew of other books). But for some strange reason all those signs were missed ignored, failed to rise to the higher echelons. Of course, I would be the last person to suggest that George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld were unspeakably, unforgivably, negligent by ignoring the clear warnings of the Clinton administration on Al Qaeda - complaining about all the attention being focused on "just one man;" snickering, "Okay, you've covered your ass" when folks from CIA came to brief them.

Actually, I confess it. I just lied to you. I was one of the first to suggest that the Bush administration, through its utter incompetence, bears a heavy responsibility for the carnage of 9/11. I was saying so a few hours after the attacks to my friends from Finland who called to make sure that we were okay.

If nothing else, the exposure of the latest potential atrocity simply highlights how incompetent the Bushites were. No, they didn't "let it happen" and it certainly wasn't a black op to boost Bush in the polls. It's just that, well, Richard Clarke had been pushed aside, John O'Neill had quit in disgust to manage WTC security, Robert Mueller was the new kid on the block, and John Ashcroft was proofreading an arrangement of "When the Eagle Soars" for seven kazoos and musical saw. Meanwhile, many others were simply ignored and let the obsessive, paranoid and quite essential monitoring of bin Laden's activities drop.

That failure to pay attention to reality is a hallmark of the Bush administration.

That is not the official spin. It's just looking at the facts. But this is not repeated endlessly.

Something else repeated endlessly regarding the war and Joe Lieberman in particular, here from David Broder, is this -

The people backing Lamont are nothing if not sincere. But their breed of Democrats - many of them wealthy, educated, extremely liberal - often pick candidates who are rejected by the broader public. Many of the older Lamont supporters went straight from Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern in the 1960s and '70s to Howard Dean in 2004. They helped Joe Duffey challenge Senator Tom Dodd in Connecticut for the 1970 Democratic nomination on the Vietnam War issue, only to lose to Republican Lowell Weicker in November.

Jonathan Schwarz here comments -

Apparently there's some kind of batsignal for the US punditocracy that tells them all what to write each week. This week their orders are to inform us that the Democrats had better watch out for those far-left elitists like Ned Lamont, who will with their extreme anti-war positions lead them to defeat just like George McGovern did.

… This might make you wonder certain things - like, was opposition to Vietnam the "wealthy, educated" position? I know it's fun to listen to stories from Uncle Dave B, and extremely boring to look at reality. But let's give reality a shot just this once.

So he displays all the polling from 1971 - and the man has his facts wrong. The wealthy, educated, extremely liberal were not there. The grade school-educated were always the most dovish, the college-educated the most hawkish. But then, conventional wisdom is conventional wisdom. The facts be damned.

As for the polls Schwarz lays out on this generation's issues, he sees this - "Weirdly, as you see, more education doesn't necessarily push you either way on Iraq. It seems to make you more ambivalent - while those with less education are both the most dovish and the most hawkish, with little ambivalence."

So that spin from Broder and the rest is fine, it's just not based on the facts. And it is believed by all.

What to make of all this? There's no fighting the spin. Give in. You'll be more comfortable.