Two More Notches In Romney's Belt As He Stumbles On To Super Tuesday

Never mind that Mitt Romney won the Michigan Republican presidential primary yesterday by the hair of his chinny chin chin. If he is the eventual nominee he has no chance of carrying the state where his father was a beloved governor. This because this favorite son has managed to alienate auto executives as well as assembly line workers because of his opposition to the auto industry bailout and pathetic attempts to rationalize it.

As it is, Romney finds himself in dire straits although he once had the most money and has the best campaign organization. This is for two reasons: He is the ultimate empty suit who played the expectations game far too long and he is being nibbled to death by Rick Santorum, a sanctimonious demagogue who acts like he is running for Pope and stands even less of a chance of prevailing in November than he does.

Oh, yeah, Romney also won in Arizona yesterday.

CROSSOVER DEMS DIDN'T MATTER

Is there anything that Romney hasn't flip-flopped on?

He decried efforts by Democrats and Santorum to get Democrats to vote in Michigan's open primary as "a new low," but that is exactly what he did in the 1990s in Massachusetts in voting as a Republican in a Democratic presidential primary.

Michigan has no voter registration and voters could request a Republican or Democratic ballot. Voting booths were open only to Republicans, but party rules allow anyone to declare themselves a Republican on the spot — temporarily — and then vote.

From all indications, the efforts in Michigan to undermine Romney did not bring Santorum a substantial number of votes, let alone may a difference.

MONEY HIS HOW HE KEEPS SCORE

People like Romney, of course, live in a world where money is how you keep score, as one pundit put it, and by that standard he is a huge winner. But you would think he would be a little more modest when he climbs onto the soapbox.

Yet the real Mitt keeps saying stuff in Tourette's Syndrome-like outbursts that remind us of his wealth and privilege. In the run-up to the Michigan vote he stepped in it twice, first when was asked whether he follows NASCAR, to which he responded, "“Not as closely as some of the most ardent fans. But I have some great friends who are NASCAR team owners.”

And then for good measure actually bragged at another appearance that his wife drives "a couple of Cadillacs," this in a state where nearly one in 10 workers are unemployed.

CAN IT GET ANY WORSE? PROBABLY

It is hard to imagine the vituperation among the Republican presidential wannabes getting worse, but they have the better part of a week to prove me wrong as they hop-scotch across the country campaigning for the Super Tuesday primaries on March 6.

The name calling has resulted in an unprecedented level of public scolding from GOP bigs ranging from Maine Governor Paul LePage , who told a meeting of his fellow governors that the primary season has been “too messy” for any of the candidates to enter the fall campaign on a strong footing and urged his party to pick a “fresh face” at the Tampa convention this summer, to Jeb Bush, who says he has found the campaigning "a little troubling" because the candidates are appealing to voters' emotions rather than more overarching political concerns.

"I used to be a conservative and I watch these debates and I'm wondering, I don't think I've changed, but it's a little troubling sometimes when people are appealing to people's fears and emotion rather than trying to get them to look over the horizon for a broader perspective and that's kind of where we are," Bush said.

WE DON'T NEED ANOTHER STINKIN' BUSH

Bush is considered by some Republicans to be the last best hope to derail President Obama although he has repeatedly said he would not accept a convention draft.

This is just fine with Ann Coulter, who says that "I think on closer examination, Jeb Bush would be the worst of all candidates to run, for one thing. We don't need another Bush. That would be embarrassing to the Republican Party.

RICKY LEADS IN THREE STATES

Even with Santorum's second-place finish in Michigan, the campaigning is far from over.

Polls in forthcoming Super Tuesday states show that Romney is ahead in Massachusetts, Vermont and Virginia, Santorum is ahead Ohio, Oklahoma and Tennessee, and Newt Gingrich (remember him?) ahead in his native Georgia.

A split will insure that the campaign slogs on indefinitely.

Cartoon by KAL/The Economist

Happy Birthday, Abeer Qassim Hamza

This is the story of how the three most powerful men in America were responsible for the gang rape of a 14-year-old girl, who was burned to a blackened char, and the murder of her parents and sister.

The enablers of these heinous crimes were President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who conspired to invade Iraq for bogus reasons, then starved the Army of the men and materiel to get the job done, which led to a lengthy occupation that triggered an Al Qaeda insurgency and a protracted civil war.

Journalist Jim Frederick describes the scene that Abu Muhammad came upon when he was summoned to his cousin's house on March 12, 2006:

"Abu Muhammad had seen what the insurgent death squads could do, but he had never witnessed anything like this. Each body was a different sort of travesty. Qassim, the father, was facedown in the far corner of the bedroom, in a lake of his own burgundy blood. His shirt was brightly patterned, striped with white, orange and brown. The front of his skull had been blasted off. Gore and large chunks of gray matter stippled the walls in a wide, V-shaped pattern. A large amount of Qassim's brain, about the size of a fist, lay nearby on an intricately woven rug.

"Not far from Hassim was Hadeel, just six years old. Wearing a bright pink dress, she was beautiful, her face almost pristine like a death mask, except that she was covered with blood, liters of it. It was everywhere, matting her hair, soaking her dress, covering her face in a thin dried sheen. A bullet fired from behind -- perhaps she had been running away from her assailant -- had blown the back right quadrant of her skull apart, A piece of it was lying several feet away, covered in skin and hair. Her hair band had been thrown across the room by the whiplash of the impact. In her right hand she was still clutching some plants she had just picked, a kind of wild sweet grass that Iraqi children frequently gather and eat for fun.

"Closest to the door was Fakhirah, the mother, wearing a black abaya and an emerald velveteen housedress embroidered with white flowers. She was lying on her back with her eyes wide open. Abu Muhammad thought his cousin might still be alive. He reached down to feel her pulse. Nothing. She was dead. He turned her over, and then he saw the hole. She had been shot in the back, but the rich, dark hues of her clothing obscured the full extent of her wound.

"Shaken, Abu Muhammad moved into the living room. There was Abeer, only fourteen years old. What they had done to her, it was unspeakable. Her body was still smoking; her entire upper torso had been scorched, much of it burnt down to ash. Her chest and face were gone with only the tips of her fingers sticking out from the purple scraps of her dress sleeves, recognizably human. The lower half of her body, however, was mostly intact. Her thin, spindly legs were spread and, rigid in death, still bent at the knees. She was naked from the waist down, her tights and underwear nearby."

NEVER CALLED TO ACCOUNT

Why dredge up a nearly six-year-old incident in a war that effectively ended in December?

The answer is that today would have been Abeer Qassim Hamza's 20th birthday. And that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld have never been called to account for masterminding the greatest foreign policy disaster in American history. And never will be. Absent a deathbed confession, we cannot expect any member of this troika to acknowledge that the deaths of nearly 4,000 Americans, Abeer and her family and perhaps 100,000 Iraqis in all was because of their politically-driven neocon blood lust.

The vast majority of the soldiers sent to Iraq performed and behaved admirably, and that was true of most of the troopers in 1st Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division.

There was only one other known atrocity of this magnitude in Iraq -- the Hadifa Massacre, and rapes and murders were extremely rare in Iraq despite the fact that they happen in every war and by one estimate U.S. troops raped 18,000 women in the European theater between 1942 and 1945.

First Battalion was assigned to the Triangle of Death, an area south of Baghdad that only weeks after the March 2003 invasion already was becoming the most restive hotbed of the insurgency. There were far too few boots on the ground to effectively deal with the task at hand, pleas for more troops went unheeded, and when commanders complained to the Pentagon about troop levels they effectively short-circuited their careers.

The travails of Bravo Company, home to the men who went on the rape and murder spree, were especially severe. They were physically isolated and had no knowledge of how their efforts were fitting into the war's broader strategy, let alone what that strategy might be.

The rape and murders were singularly heinous because they were so calculated. But to lay the entire responsibility for them on Private First Class Steven Green, who was the ringleader, and Sergeant Paul Cortez and Privates First Class James Barker, Brian Howard and Jesse Spielman is wrong because others up the chain of command all the way to the Pentagon and White House also were culpable.

ONE BIG KILLING FIELD

By the time 1st Battalion deployed to the Triangle of Death in November 2005, the people whom Cheney had declared would welcome Americans with open arms were longing for Saddam Hussein. Iraq had become one big killing field with armed militias roaming the cities and countryside, and Shiites and Sunnis killing whomever they pleased at will.

The Georgia National Guard unit that the 1st Battalion replaced had become so cowed that it had stopped patrolling roads where IEDs (improvised explosive devices) had detonated, meaning that pretty much the entire area went uncovered as the guardsmen cowered in their barracks.

Despite boasts by Rumsfeld, that the troops in Iraq were the best equipped in the history of warfare, the conditions that 1st Battalion had to endure were deplorable.

As Frederick writes in Black Hearts: One Platoon's Descent Into Madness in Iraq's Triangle of Death, there was no chow hall or even a kitchen to cook meals except at Camp Striker, the battalion headquarters. At bases "away from the flagpole," in military parlance, all food was either MRE combat rations or hamburger patties and steaks that had to be grilled on storm drains. There were no dishes or cutlery so the men had to eat MREs and grilled meat with their hands.

There was no electricity and no lighting that wasn't battery operated, no air conditioning during the day and no heat at night. There were no showers and no toilets, and troopers defecated into so-called WAG Bags, garbage bags with solvents inside that were tied off, thrown in a pit and burned. First Platoon's first major casualty was to be a soldier who suffered bad burns when he threw a match into a diesel fuel-soaked pit filled with the bags.

Humvees were inadequately armored and there wasn't enough body armor to go around, a situation that was not corrected until later in the war and only then because of an expose in a stateside newspaper. And there were no coordinated night recognition signals, resulting in troopers firing on the trucks of other troopers, sometimes with fatal results.

Then there was battalion commander Lieutenant Colonel Tom Kunk.

"His reaction to everything was the same," a company first sergeant told Frederick. "If you lost a soldier, or if you had cigarette butts on the FOB [forward operating base], it was the same reaction. He would explode on you. He would just lose his mind, which made his whole leadership style just totally ineffective."

Said one captain: "If you continually crush their spirit, they are going to be timid, wondering if everything they do will earn them another ass chewing. It had an impact on the way those guys operated."

Kunk also whitewashed the reports he sent up to brigade headquarters.

"They would call three guys a squad," a first sergeant said. "But you can't turn three guys into nine unless you're lying."

"It's not like one little piece of information is going to lose the war," a company executive office said, "but when you see the cumulative effect of information becoming whitewashed in order to tell a story that a battalion or brigade commander wants to tell to their highers, then you got real problems. That's the more sinister side of it."

Meanwhile, the Iraq Army was useless and 1st Platoon troopers quickly came to loath the civilian population. The one member of the platoon who took a liking to Iraqis, becoming nearly fluent in Arabic as he got to know the locals, was called "an Iraqi cock sucker."

And the enemy was everywhere.

HE WAS CRAZY

"What that company is going through would turn your hair white," an officer at Camp Victory in Baghdad told Frederick. "I'm only twenty miles away, and most of the people on Victory have no idea how bloody the fight is down there."

IEDs were cleared with the help of Iron Claw bomb-sniffing teams riding in massive armored vehicles, but as soon as a road was cleared it was reseeded by insurgents. The battalion resorted to parking Humvees at one- or two-mile intervals along a key road that was a resupply route, but the ideal relief in the form of Iraqi soldiers manning these checkpoints never came. They simply refused to operate in so dangerous an area.

The parked vehicles evolved into poorly defended Tactical Check Points surrounded by concertina wire where soldiers would be assigned for six-day intervals, further depleting the platoon's patrol and combat power, and most troopers felt like they were school crossing guards when manning them. When six-foot cubed mesh baskets that when filled made excellent defensive barriers finally arrived, there were no backhoes to fill them.

It was at one such checkpoint at the edge of Mahmudiya that Steven Green helped hatch the plan to rape Abeer and kill she and her family.

With the Army strapped for personnel, Green had been granted a moral waiver because of prior convictions for drugs and other bad behavior when he enlisted in the Army, and by 2005 such waivers were granted to almost one in five recruits.

He was not a bad soldier, but he was crazy. He was a racist and white supremacist who was unable to control his impulses and railed about "niggers," Jews, northerners, foreigners and Iraqis. And he occasionally drooled, a childhood habit that he had not completely broken.

Green, who became the first former U.S. soldier to face the death penalty for war crimes in a civilian court because he had been discharged before he was arrested, had matter of factly explained to a journalist three weeks before the rape-murders that "I came over here to kill people."

By December, 1st Platoon was losing men at the rate of about one a week and an already fraying platoon that lived "outside the wire" -- a term for the outposts -- was unraveling quickly, while Bravo Company's 2nd and 3rd Platoons seemed to be humming right along with few problems. Frederick attributes this to those platoons outstanding sergeants and active efforts to combat the hate that 1st Platoon had succumbed to.

Iraqi civilians were now being beaten routinely by 1st Platoon troopers, drinking increased and became more open, and men would burst into tears while eating their lunches. And after being continuously told that they were screwups, Frederick said the platoon subconsciously decided to live up to its outcast status.

Meanwhile, none of the basics essential to maintaining morale and welfare of combat soldiers had been provided and officers and NCOs who complained about this state of affairs were considered whiners.

Two platoon mates who had disobeyed one of Keck's orders and had taken off their helmets at one of the checkpoints were fatally shot in the head by an Iraqi civilian. This was followed by the deaths of two men in an IED blast and then two more in another blast. Later a forward operating base widely considered to be a firetrap burned to the ground because there were too few fire extinguishers.

The carnage prompted Green to tell Keck that "I just want to get out there and get some revenge on those motherfuckers. They all deserve to die."

"Calling them that is like calling me a nigger," interjected Command Sergeant Major Anthony Edwards, Keck's senior NCO. "This sounds like you hate a whole race of people."

"That's about it right there," said Green. "You just about summed it up."

Green had finally snapped.

"Most of the men by this point hated Iraqis and many would offhandedly opine that the whole country needed to be leveled, or the only good Iraqi was a dead Iraq," writes Frederick. "But only Green talked about killing Iraqis all the time. . . . Only he talked about burning them alive so they had to smell their own flesh cooking. Everybody was frustrated that the enemy was cowardly, but Green had a harder time accepting that this was simply the nature of this war: U.S. soldiers had to behave more honorably than the enemy. Why, he sincerely wanted to know, did Americans have to restrain themselves when the insurgents did not?"

Bravo's company commander sent Green to see a combat stress nurse who diagnosed him with Combat and Operational Stress Reaction, an Army term to describe the typically and usually transient stresses of warfare. The nurse noted Green's obsession with killing Iraqis and then sent him back to Bravo.

His next appointment with the nurse would be on March 20, eight days after the rape-murders.

'I'VE NEVER FUCKED ONE OF THESE BITCHES'

On March 12, Green was pulling predawn guard duty in a gun truck at Tactical Command Post 2. He had been up for 18 hours. Two of 2nd Squads sergeants were elsewhere and Paul Cortez had been rotated in and left in charge although the sergeant was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

"When I'm on guard next time," Green told Cortez and James Barker, "I'm going to waste a bunch of dudes in a car. And we'll just say they were running the TCP."

"Don't do that!" Cortez exclaimed. "Don't do it while I'm here. I'm supposed to be running this shit."

Barker agreed and said he had a better idea.

"We've all killed Hadjis [Iraqis], but I've been here twice and I still never fucked one of these bitches."

Cortez's interest was piqued, and so was Green's. They talked more about it as the morning wore on and Barker said that he had already picked the target -- a house not far from the checkpoint where a man and three women lived, one a teenager or in her twenties whom he thought was pretty hot. The family had an AK-47 assault rifle, which was allowable under Iraqi law, and he said he knew where it was hidden.

Witnesses were a problem, however, but Green said he would take care of that.

"You'll kill them, right?" Barker asked.

"Absolutely," Green replied. "It don't make any difference to me. A Hadji is a Hadji."

At around noon, the three men and Jesse Spielman sat down outside the TCP with a cardboard box as a table to play Uno. They drank Iraqi whiskey mixed with Rip It, a carbonated energy drink, and soon became very drunk.

Cortez finally said, "If we are going to do this, let's go before I change my mind." Cortez and Barker would take the girl, Green would kill the rest of the family, Spielman would pull guard and Bryan Howard, who was newly arrived in the platoon, would stay behind and man the radio.

Some of the men changed into clothing that made them look like insurgents. Green grabbed a shotgun, Barker took Howard's M4 carbine and Spielman picked up an M14 rifle.

The targeted house was the home of Qassim and Fakriah Hamza al-Janabi. They were poor but dreamed of building a big family and sending their children -- daughters Abeer, 14, and Hadeel, 6, and son Muhammad,12, who happened to be at school that afternoon -- to university.

With the arrival of the Americans in Mahmudiyah and the quick deterioration of relations between the occupiers and locals, Wassim and Fakriah had become concerned about their daughters, whom they took out of school.

Abeer was of special concern. She had big doe eyes, a small mouth and gentle features. On the verge of womanhood, she was tall for her age and her fragile beauty was attracting a lot of unwanted attention. Soldiers would give her the thumbs-up and say, "Very good, very nice," and Muhammad had once watched a soldier run a finger down terrified sister's cheek.

By early March, the harassment of Abeer had become so bad that cousin Abu Muhammad told the family that he would take her to live with him at his secluded house. Abeer stayed there only one night, March 9 or 10, and Qassim came the next day to bring her back home.

Frederick describes what transpired in a few short minutes:

"Sneaking up to the dingy home, Cortez and Barker broke to the right around a small shack in the front. Spielman and Green broke left. Spielman and Green found little Hadeel and father Qassim in the driveway. Green grabbed the man and Spielman grabbed the girl and they marched them inside. Barker and Cortez cleared the house, checking the foyer, the hallway, and moving plast the kitchen, where Cortez stopped to grab the woman, Fakhriah, and Abeer. Green and Spielman entered the house while Barker continued with the sweep, checking the bathroom and the toilet room, the bedroom and the living room. Then he headed up the stairs to the roof, checked the roof, and went back down the stairs.

"The others had corralled the whole family into the bedroom. After they had recovered the family's AK-47 and Green confirmed that it was locked and loaded, Barker and Cortez left, yanking Abeer behind them. Spielman pulled the bedroom door shut and then set up guard in the doorway between the foyer and the living room while Cortez shoved Abeer into the living room. Cortez pushed Abeer down on the ground and Barker walked over to her and pinned her outstretched arms down with his knees.

"In the bedroom, Green was trying to get the man, woman and child to lie down on the floor. They were scared, screaming in Arabic. Green was shouting back, 'Get down, get down now!'

"Back at the TCP, Howard was trying to get Cortez on the radio, each time saying there was a convoy coming and they needed to come back. They never responded. No Humvees actually came during the ten to 15 minutes that they were gone, but Howard was panicked. [Private Seth] Scheller and he were out there all alone.

"In the living room, Cortez pulled Abeer's tights off. She was crying, screaming in Arabic, trying to struggle free as Barker continued to hold her in place. Cortez was masturbating, trying to get an erection. He started to make thrusting motions. 'What the fuck am I doing?' he later recalled thinking at the time. 'At the same time, I didn't care, either. I wanted her to feel the pain of the dead soldiers.'

"In the bedroom, Green was losing control of his prisoners. They weren't getting down on the ground. Terrified, they were yelling, and they weren't responding to Green's orders. The woman made a run for the bedroom door. Green shot her once in the back and she fell to the floor. The man, agitated before, now became unhinged. Green turned the AK on him and pulled the trigger. It jammed. He tried to clear it several more times, but it kept sticking. Panicking, as the man started advancing on him, Green switched to his shotgun.

"Green couldn't remember if there was anything in the chamber, so he pumped once and a full shell ejected. Then, Green said, 'I shot him the way I had been taught: one in the head and two in the chest.' The first shot blasted the top of the man's head off. He dropped backward to the floor as buckshot from the following shots continued to riddle his body.

"Then Green turned toward the little girl, who was spinning away from him, running for a corner. Green returned to the AK and tried to clear it again, and this time it worked. He raised the rifle and shot Hadeel in the back of the head. She fell to the ground. . . .

"As Green was executing the family, Cortez finished raping Abeer and switched positions with Barker. Barker's penis was only half hard. Despite all her squirming and kicking, Barker forced himself on Abeer and raped her.

"Green came out of the bedroom and announced to Barker and Cortez, 'They're all dead. I killed them all.' Barker got up and headed toward the kitchen. He wanted to look outside the window, see if anything was happening outside. As he did that, Green propped the AK-47 he was carrying against the wall, got down between Abeer's legs, and as Cortez held her down, Green raped her. . . .

"The men were becoming extremely frenzied and agitated now. Spielman lifted Abeer's dress up around her neck and touched her exposed right breast. Barker brought a kerosene lamp he had found in the kitchen and dumped the contents on Abeer's splayed legs and torso. Spielman handed a lighter to either Barker or Cortez, who lit the flame. Spielman went to the bedroom and found some blankets to throw on the body to stoke the fire. As the flames engulfing Abeer's body grew, Green, hoping to blow up the house, opened the valve on the propane tank in the kitchen and told everybody to get out of there."

COVERUP, RETALIATION & AFTERMATH

The Iraqi Army began interviewing neighbors and family members the morning after the rape-murders. Some said that it was the Iraqi Army, others said it was the Americans and still others said that it was a family feud gone bad, while 1st Platoon said it was Sunni insurgents. The Hamza Al-Janabi family was buried in a nearby cemetery and there was little or no physical evidence beyond a few AK-47 shell casings.

On March 20, Green kept his appointment at the Combat Stress office in Mahmudiyah. He confessed to having recently thrown a puppy off of the roof of a house that was being searched and said that was no big deal. In subsequent meetings over the next few days, a combat stress nurse concluded that he wasn't registering the moral implications of what he had done.

She concluded that Green had a preexisting antisocial personality disorder, a condition marked by indifference to the suffering of others and recommended to Kunk the he be discharged. Even though Green had committed rape and quadruple homicide just 11 days earlier, the nurse's mental-health-status evaluation sheet that initiated the personality order discharge stated that his current potential for harm to others was "low."

Green remained at Mahmudiyah for a few more weeks for observation and processing. By April 14, he was headed back to the U.S. and was honorably discharged at Fort Campbell, Kentucky on May 16.

The cover-up of the rape-murders began to unravel in mid-June.

On June 16, the checkpoint where Green and the others had hatched the plot was attacked and overrun. Specialist David Babineau was killed and Privates First Class Thomas Tucker and Kristian Menchaca were captured.

The bodies of the two troopers were found on June 19, and judging from a video shot by the insurgent abductors, both were eviscerated and half naked, dirty with caked blood and mud, just as one would appear after being dragged behind a truck. Tucker was decapitated and a man, after holding his severed head aloft like a trophy, placed it on Tucker's body. Al Qaeda in Iraq later said the attack was in retaliation for the rape of Abeer and murder of her family and the leader of AQI himself had slaughtered the two men himself.

While the search for Tucker and Menchaca was on, Sergeant Tony Yribe remarked to Private First Class Justin Watt that "It just drives me crazy that all the good men die and the shitbag murderers like Green are home eating hamburgers."

"Murderers?" Watt asked.

Yribe told Watt about the rape-murders and that Green had confessed to him that he had acted alone. The less you know about it -- the better, Yribe had said.

Watt was horrified. He began obsessing on Abeer's father for reasons he didn't understand and couldn't sleep. When he ran into Howard he insinuated that something really messed up had happened in March. Convinced that Watt knew the whole story, Howard filled in many of the missing pieces and implicated Barker, Cortez and Spielman.

Watt called his father, who had been an airborne combat engineer in the 1970s, and asked him what he would do if his brothers in arms had done something really bad.

"You should let your conscience be your guide," his father had replied. "If it is as heinous as you say, you can't let your loyalty to your men get in the way of doing what is right.

Wanting to bypass what he believed would be a skeptical command structure, Watt revealed the crimes during a psychological health counseling session on June 22.

Meanwhile, rumors about the rape-murder began to percolate through 1st Platoon and eventually reached Kunk after two troopers went to their superiors.

While skeptical of the allegations, Kunk ordered an investigation. Then, a few days after the memorial service for Babineau, Tucker and Menchaca, the commanding officer called a kind of town hall meeting.

Frederick writes that Kunk began by telling them, with complete unconcern for the men who were brave enough to speak up, "You are right to think that there is a lot of suspicion and finger-pointing going on because [two men] came forward to tell the chain of command that five of your shitbag friends probably raped a girl and killed her whole family. And these guys are cracking, it looks like they are guilty."

"We thought we were going to get the 'Keep your heads up' speech," said one soldier. " . . . He just crushed us."

The four active-duty soldiers involved were arrested and were court martialed.

Barker pleaded guilty to rape and murder as part of a plea agreement requiring him to testify against the other soldiers to avoid the death penalty. He was sentenced to 90 years in prison and must serve 20 years before being considered for parole.

Cortez pleaded guilty to rape and murder as part of a plea agreement to avoid the death penalty. He was sentenced to 100 years in prison and must serve 10 years before being considered for parole.

Spielman was convicted of rape and murder. He was sentenced to 110 years in prison with the possibility of parole after 10 years.

All three men are being held at the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

Howard was sentenced under a plea agreement to a dishonorable discharge. He served 27 months in prison for obstruction of justice and being an accessory after the fact.

Green was arrested as a civilian and was convicted in the U.S.District court in Paducah, Kentucky. In September 2009, he was sentenced to four consecutive life sentences in prison with no possibility of parole and is being held in the U.S. Penitentiary in Tucson, Arizona.

Kunk, who was investigated because of reports of numerous acts of complacency and a lack of standards at the platoon level, received a letter of concern, the least serious form of admonishment and one that carries no real punitive weight or negative long-term implications for an officer's career. Two of his NCOs received letters of reprimand.

Justin Watt, the whistleblower, received a medical discharge and now runs a computer business. He said that he has received death threats.

Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are retired and except for Cheney, are little in the news. All three have published memoirs that whitewash their roles in starting and utterly screwing up America's longest war.

Abeer's next-of-kind received a $30,000 check from the U.S. government in compensation for the rape-murders.

PHOTOGRAPHS (From top): Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld; Abeer; Blood-splattered wall of the Al Janabi home; Map of the Triangle of Death; Tactical checkpoint where rape-murder plot was hatched; 1st Platoon trooper on patrol; Green, possibly with the shotgun he used in the murders; Barker; Cortez; Spielman; Watt; Babineau; Menchaca; Tucker; Green at sentencing.

Cartoon du Jour

Jim Morin/Miami Herald

For Romney, There's Nowhere To Go But Down. Then There's The Convention.

1976 FLASHBACK

The latest Republican-centric Rasmussen nightly tracking poll is out and it's bad news for the struggling Mitt Romney: For the first time, he dropped below 40 percent against President Obama despite a strong performance in the Arizona presidential debate.

Rasmussen tracked the incumbent at 49 percent while Romney got 39 percent, and if the pattern of tit-for-tat primary victories -- with Romney taking one or two and then Rick Santorum taking two or three -- continues, the likelihood of neither candidate having the requisite 1,245 delegates to secure the nomination in Tampa grows.

This, of course, raises the exquisite prospect of a brokered convention, but Republican Party elders who are desperate for a Romney-Obama face-off must surely realized that the GOP has been turned on its ear since the last brokered convention in 1976 when party deal makers sealed the nomination for President Ford over an up-and-comer by the name of Ronald Reagan.

That was when party leaders in the form of monied conservatives, state chairman, governors and influential congressfolk had the clout to broker the outcome, but in acceding to a toxic cocktail of Christianists and Tea Partiers in recent years in the service of short-term electoral gains, they also acceded power, which in the GOP is now pretty much from the bottom up and not the top down. Long story short, the people with torches and pitchforks do not take orders from party elders.

This is very bad news for Romney and very good news for Santorum since the former Massachusetts governor is anathema to the new party base and the former senator from Pennsylvania is a far better fit even though only Romney has a chance of beating President Obama.

As Dick Polman writes at NewsWorks:

"Elected leaders used to have a lot of sway when the chips were down. But who, down at the grassroots, is going to take direction from John Boehner? Or Mitch McConnell? Or the Bush family? Or any of the governors (Chris Christie, Haley Barbour, Mitch Daniels) who have already fled center stage in 2012? None of them can speak for the party, much less knock heads together.

"Maybe Fox News chairman Roger Ailes is a pillar of a new kind of establishment. Or Sean Hannity. Or Rush Limbaugh. Or radio host Mark Levin. Or Karl Rove, assuming he has sufficiently distanced himself from the wreckage of the Bush administration he brought to power. But none of those people are brokers, in the traditional sense. They are agitators, not conciliators. If the GOP winds up this summer with a nominee who can't unite the party -- or no nominee, mathematically speaking -- those people are likely to gin up the frenzy, not staunch it by seeking a solution."

Political scientist Larry Sabato offers a compelling alternative: If no candidate wins a delegate majority, the brokers may well be the candidates themselves. Writes Sabato:

"Their delegates are bound for at least one ballot, and most are personally loyal to the candidate and may follow his lead for multiple ballots, if it comes to that. Romney, Santorum, Gingrich and Paul will have slogged through all 50 states by convention time. Why would they permit someone who slept in his own bed and had regular meals for the past year to swoop in and take the big prize? More likely, perhaps through trusted intermediaries, the four contenders would negotiate a solution — a ticket, platform and prime-time speech schedule."

The alternative, Sabato notes, is chaos, and that would be disastrous after a lengthy primary season that has been the very definition of chaotic.

Cartoon du Jour

Pat Oliphant/Universal News Syndicate

The Supremes: Those Wild & Crazy Lads In The Black Bathrobes Are At It Again

The Warren and Roberts Supreme Courts bookend my life. The court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren from 1953 to 1969, expanded civil rights, civil liberties and federal power in dramatic ways, while the court led by Chief Justice John Roberts beginning in 2005 has inhibited civil rights and civil liberties and expanded the power of the court to make law and cast law aside when it doesn't meet its political criteria.

Chief among the laws it has cast aside is that limiting political contributions in the 2010 Citizens United case, which without question is the worst high court ruling since the Dred Scott outrage in 1857. That's a lot of years and a lot of rulings, and in some respects the Warren court was as liberal as the Roberts court is conservative, but the Warren court was judicious (pun intended) in conferring and ruling on civil liberties while the Citizen's United decision, in which a majority of justices ruled that corporations have the same rights as individuals, was a highjacking.

Six years on, the Roberts court could hijack again in ruling on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, but there are indications that it is going slow. Some five and a half hours of oral arguments were originally scheduled for March, but the time allotted has been bumped up to six hours with the extra half hour devoted to whether the Anti-Injunction Act may apply.

This federal statute, promulgated in 1793. states that courts may not halt a tax that hasn't yet been collected, and a tax written into the Affordable Care Act as part of its mandate provision won't be collected until 2014.

If you are a fan of ObamaCare, celebrating would be premature.

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals threw out a lawsuit last fall against the mandate on this basis and most courts have stated that the statute doesn’t apply. The Obama administration agrees but argues that the mandate provision functions more as a penalty than a revenue-raising tax.

Some observers have noted that this might just be the high court doing its due diligence, while others say that Roberts may not want a ruling to become an election year issue. I happen to think that the court does due diligence only when it has a particular need to cover its ass, while Roberts and his conservative posse -- Justices Alito, Scalia and Thomas -- are far less influenced by public opinion than was the previous court led by Chief Justice John Rehnquist.

This was on offer last week when the court had an opportunity to reconsider Citizens United in light of a Montana state court ruling that upheld a state campaign finance law passed as a result of the political corruption that is rife in that state.

A striking difference between the Montana law and Citizens United decision is that the law was upheld by the state court after a review of political corruption while Citizens United was conjured out of thin air with no evidentiary record whatsoever.

And without question will lead to corruption in the form of corporations and wealthy individuals influencing the outcome of elections -- including the ongoing Republican presidential cage match.

Cartoon du Jour

Jeff Danziger/New York Times News Syndicate

Musings On A Nightmare Scenario: The Likelihood Of Israeli Strikes Against Iran

There is one scenario that I and others are not taking into account in predicting that President Obama will win -- and possibly win in a landslide -- in November: An Israeli air strike on Iranian nuclear facilities that would plunge the Middle East into war and rupture relations between Washington and Jerusalem.

Such a strike is a distinct possibility, according to an unimpeachable source: Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who has acknowledged that he was the source for a column earlier this month by David Ignatius of The Washington Post, who reiterated this last Friday on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" show that a "timetable exists, and I know nothing that's changed."

That timetable, according to what Panetta told Ignatius, is April, May or June -- before Iran enters what Israelis describe as a "zone of immunity" to commence building a nuclear bomb.

"Let me just say, Leon Panetta is somebody who clearly thinks that it would be a mistake from Israel’s standpoint and from the standpoint of the security interests of the United States for this [attack] to go forward" Ignatius said this morning, "and he has said that very directly to Israelis. My column certainly expressed that, and I think he feels that’s his job. He’s got to tell people what he thinks."

Obama has navigated the minefields of international diplomacy with a deftness that escaped the Bush administration and has taken the lead calling for tougher international sanctions on Iran that have further crippled its ailing economy and squeezed its restive middle class. But all bets on an Obama win in November would be off because of the unpredictable ripple effects from an air strike -- which three of the four Republican presidential candidates have said they would support. These effects include terror attacks on the American homeland.

Sadly, the Israeli government is crazy enough to carry out airstrikes on the Islamic republic without U.S. support.

Never mind that Israel's own nuclear weapons program is an open secret. Iran does pose a threat to the Jewish state that the bellicose Netanyahu government believes sanctions alone will not mitigate.

There are perhaps two dozen suspected nuclear facilities in Iran, as well as warhead and missile plants. The 1000-megawatt nuclear plant Bushehr would likely be the target of strikes, and by some estimates which are disputed by some Iran experts, the spent fuel from this facility would be capable of producing 50 to 75 bombs. Also, the suspected nuclear facilities at Natanz and Arak will likely be targets of an air attack.

It would not be the first time that Israel has targeted countries that it believed threatened it.

On June 7, 1981, Israel launched Operation Opera, a surprise air strike on a nuclear reaction under construction about 10 miles southeast of Baghdad. Iraq had purchased the reaction from France and both countries asserted it would be used for peaceful purposes, but Israel viewed it with suspicion and asserted the air strike was an act of self defense. Ten Iraqi soldiers and a French civilian were killed. The reactor, which Israel said would become operational in about a month was destroyed. It probably was not a coincidence that the strike occurred three weeks before elections for the Knesset, the Israeli parliament.

Iran, with the cooperation of Israel had launched an air strike on the reactor at the outset of the Iran-Iraq War in 1980, while Iran allowed an Israeli Air Force F-15 involved in Operation Opera to enter its airspace and make an emergency landing.

On October 1, 1985, Israel launched an air strike on the Palestine Liberation Organization headquarters in Hammam al-Shatt, Tunisia, in all likelihood with U.S. cooperation. The headquarters was completely destroyed, although PLO head Yasser Arafat was not there at the time. Israel claimed that 60 PLO members were killed. According to other sources, 56 Palestinians and 15 Tunisians were killed and about 100 wounded.

Under a worst-case scenario, the air strikes against Iran would commence when Netanyahu ordered perhaps 100 Israeli F-15s and F-16s to fly east toward that country, possibly by violating Saudi Arabian or Iraqi air space or threading the boarder between Syria and Turkey. The region is thick with U.S. warplanes but in all likelihood the U.S. Central Command, on instructions from the White House, would not order them intercepted and shot down.

This is what would happen in the following days:

* Iran's centrifuges, warhead and missile plants would be destroyed or perhaps the nuclear program merely delayed.

* There would be lethal reprisals against Israel lthough Iran's air force is not particularly strong and its navy is puny.

* The price of oil would spike.

* Communities across the Jewish diaspora, including in the U.S., would be put in danger from Iranian-sponsored terror attacks like recent attacks in India and Thailand.

* Relations between Jerusalem and Washington would end, leaving Israel only marginally safer and without the support of its largest benefactor.

Illustration from The Atlantic

Cartoon du Jour

Jeff Danziger/New York Times News Syndicate

Book Review: Charyn's 'Johnny One-Eye': A Rum Tale Of The American Revolution

(Republished on the occasion of the great man's 280th birthday)

There has been a tsunami of books about George Washington in recent years, but none has captured a man whose birthday we once celebrated today with such wit and charm than Johnny One-Eye: A Tale of the American Revolution.

No matter that Jerome Charyn's account of Manhattan Island during the Revolutionary War, save for the broad historical overlay and the deeds of the familiar figures, is apocryphal from start to finish. It is a hoot. Or as the Brits might say, a rum tale.

Johnny Stocking, an orphan who was reared in a brothel and lost an eye during Benedict Arnold's raid on Quebec in 1775, is a man of two nations: He joins up with traitor-to-be Arnold as a secret agent for the British but is drawn back to the American side when he learns that Washington, who is tortured by his love for Gertrude Jennings, the brothel's madam and is or is not Johnny's mother, may be his father.

It seems at times that Johnny is the only person keeping the Revolutionary Army from losing its hold on the tumultuous island because of the machinations of the Howe brothers, Sir William of the British Army and Lord Admiral Richard of the Navy, while in between intrigues he pursues his true love, the exotic octoroon prostitute Clara from Dominica.

Gertrude and Clara also are spies with split loyalties, and much of Johnny One-Eye's fast moving plot concerns the secret services of both sides in the seven-year war for control of Manhattan, but Charyn keeps returning to Washington, whom he portrays as loving Clara, peas by the plateful and the card game vingt-et-un (blackjack).

Writes Charyn of the man whom the British referred to as the "farmer-in-chief":

"[In 1780] he was near fifty, and he'd had to cobble together an army for the past five and a half years, provide it with shoes, survive the cabals of congressmen and carping generals under his own command. 'T was Washington who fed the army, clothed it, fought the battles, ran his own stable of spies. Congress was bankrupt. Washington could not pay his soldiers. Some officers had already rebelled. But still he cobbled. His critics could not comprehend this. He was larger than their contradictions, relentless in his desire that the army not melt away, and with it the nation itself."

While some readers might have trouble sorting out the fact from the fiction, my only complaint is that at 448 pages, Johnny One-Eye is too long by perhaps a third.

No matter, it is a delight. And I bought my slightly used copy from Amazon for a mere buck and a half.

Portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart

Cartoon du Jour

Michael Ramirez/Investors Business Daily

That Hard Right Turn Is Why Dewey Will Not Be Defeating Truman This Year

You have to go all the way back to 1948 to find an instance where a political party's strategy is predicated on a president being so weak that the voters can pretty much be ignored. That's what the Republicans did in 1948 only to see Harry Truman get re-elected and that's what they have been doing over the past two years only to see Barack Obama take a healthy lead in national horse race and popularity polls.

That is the conclusion of David Frum (minus the 1948 connection) and there is perhaps no more authoritative commentator today on the parlous state of the Republican Party. Frum, a former George W. Bush administration speechwriter, has the values of the Big Tent GOP of yore and for that reason was banished from the temple. Oh, and because he voiced alarm over the party's rush to the racist right and fawning embrace of the Christianist-Tea Party jihad and its political purity tests.

Obama's rebound is helped considerably by the clown car of Republican presidential wannabes.

If you just came out of a months long coma, they included a wingnut of a congresswoman who believes Obama will send citizens to re-education camps, a billionaire birther with a mean brushover, a Texas governor who gets an F in government and foreign policy, and a former pizza magnate with a zipper problem. This leaves a libertarian with a racist bent, a former House speaker who was censured and fined by his own colleagues, a former senator who believes that a child conceived by rape is a gift from God, and a former governor who is an empty suit.

Some recent polling data backs up how asleep at the wheel Republicans have been when it comes to the guy in the Oval Office.

Ron Brownstein, who has covered almost as many president elections as I have, notes that Obama is reassembling the formidable coalition that elected him in 2008.

In 2008, Obama won 49 percent of men; Pew finds him with 45 percent against Romney. Against McCain, Obama won 56 percent of women; Pew finds him drawing 59 percent against Romney. Among white men, Pew finds Obama's support slipping from 41 percent in 2008 to 36 percent now (with all of the decline coming among white men without a college degree, the toughest audience throughout his presidency.) Among white women, though, Pew finds Obama rising from 46 percent in 2008 to 52 percent against Romney -- and recording gains among both college-plus women (whom he carried last time) and the working-class "waitress moms" who strongly preferred McCain.

To which I add that there is no scenario in which a Republican can beat Obama without the support of women who are not conservative Republicans because of the party's institutionalized misogyny.

When House Republicans suddenly decided to comprise last week on extending the payroll tax reduction and jobless benefits for the rest of the year it was an historic moment.

It was historic because it was the first time that the GOP had reached across the aisle since Obama was elected and did what was right. It also was a reflection that two-plus years of a self-indulgent Just Say No strategy -- again predicated on Obama being so weak as to be unreelectable -- has been a disaster that threatens to drag the last man standing in the candidate clown car into electoral ignominy.

Booman over at the Booman Tribune presents a plausible landslide scenario for exactly that in which Obama would win the Electoral College by a 462-76 vote, a margin that has only been bested by FDR in 1932 and 1936, LBJ in 1968, Nixon in 1972 and Reagan in 1980 and 1984.

* * * * *

As I have written previously, it is tempting to argue that the ongoing cage match between Karl Rove and the men who would deny him a Mitt Romney nomination is a battle for the soul of the Republican Party. Tempting but demonstrably false because the party lost its soul years ago and the man most responsible is Rove himself.

Rove, who is a terrific tactician but a lousy strategist, launched the GOP on a course of short-term gains at the expense of long-term viability when he engineered the nomination of George W. Bush, an empty vessel into which Dick Cheney and the neo-con brain trust poured their ideas. Ideas like going to war in Iraq while engineering massive tax cuts for the wealthy and shredding the social safety net.

With Rove continuing to be the man behind the curtain, Bush was re-elected in 2004 by making promises to the party's burgeoning Christianist wing that he could not keep and because the Democrats nominated a weakling in John Kerry, who ran a campaign so awful that the attacks on him by Bush-Rove surrogates weren't even really necessary.

In 2006 Rove, was still the GOP's mastermind as it tacked harder to the right, and it is likely that when he awoke on the morning after a Democratic mid-term sweep -- a sweep so complete that no congressional or gubernatorial seat held by a Democrat was won by a Republican and six Senate incumbents were ousted -- he may have had the first inkling that he was losing control of the party.

The 2008 presidential election would not have been a Republican win no matter who the Democratic candidate was. In fact, either John Edwards or Hillary Clinton would have beaten John McCain by a more sizable margin than did Barack Obama, but that reality does not obscure the fact the party was tacking harder still to the right and its whackadoodle ideas as epitomized by the selection of the vacuous Sarah Palin.

By 2010 Rove had, for all intents and purposes, lost control of the party as that Christianist-Tea Party jihad engineered sizable House gains which it, but surely not Rove, took as a mandate for their ideas and not what they really were -- the result of an anger against the Washington establishment fueled by the lingering effects of a recession engineered by Rove's prodigal child.

And so Rove and the GOP itself is now reaping what he sewed -- a party openly hostile to blacks and immigrants (something that he has repeatedly warned that the party will rue) and the middle class and poor -- that has become whiter, older and crankier, a reality reflected in a field of presidential wannabes who are short on ability and long on out-of-the-mainstream ideas.

Somewhere up there Harry Truman is laughing his ass off.

Cartoon du Jour

Glenn McCoy/Universal Press Syndicate

Why Rick Santorum Lost Pennsylvania

His name was on the lease but he didn't live there

Rick Santorum was once one of my U.S. senators, but that ended abruptly after the 2006 election when he lost by 18 percentage points, a record for an incumbent. I've been asked a lot recently why he got clobbered since Pennsylvania trends toward the conservative side, and the answer is easy: He went off the deep end.

This took the form of ranting against gays, Iran and religious freedom. He showed his children the dead fetus of a child that his wife had miscarried and remained an outspoken proponent of the war in Iraq at a time when Pennsylvanians, like Americans in general, had turned against it.

Had that been all, Santorum probably would have defeated Robert Casey Jr., who arguably is the most conservative Democratic senator, but there was more. Lots more:

* He make considerable political hay outside the state by visiting the deathbed of Terri Schiavo, the woman at the center of a national right-to-die controversy, but many Pennsylvanians were offended and Casey ran an effective television ad playing up the visit.

* While he listed his legal residence as a small house in the Pittsburgh suburb of Penn Hills, he raised his family in northern Virginia and rented out the house.

* He cyberschooled five of his children in the Penn Hills school district, which cost it $72,000 in cyberschooling fees. The cash-strapped district was unsuccessful in its efforts to get any of the money back and Santorum was unapologetic about taking it.

* He founded Operation Good Neighbor, a faith-based urban charity, in 2000, but most of the money went not to community groups but to salaries, rental fees and consulting fees to a network of politically connected lobbyists, aides and fundraisers.

In summary, Pennsylvanians thought they were being gamed by Santorum. And they were.

Cartoon du Jour

Tom Toles/The Washington Post

Good Riddance To Bad Rubbish

The late great Molly Ivins commented after Pat Buchanan's keynote address at the 1992 Republican National Convention that "it probably sounded better in the original German."

As people given thousands of hours of face time on cable news go, Buchanan was as vile as they come: A virulent homophobe, racist, anti-Semite and apologist for Hitler, who . . . um, was misunderstood and the U.S. should have fought on his side in The Big One.

And so I took some satisfaction when MSNBC dropped Buchanan on Thursday four months after suspending him following the publication of his latest book, Suicide of a Superpower, which contained scrumdiddlyumtious chapters titled “The End of White America” and “The Death of Christian America.”

As is typical of vile people like Buchanan, he denies that he loathes gays, Jews and blacks, and he was quick to denounce MSNBC, his employer for 10 years, as having bowed to us mean libruls.

Cartoon du Jour

Mike Luckovich/Atlanta Journal Constitution

Rick Santorum Is Crazy -- Like A Fox

There is no doubt that Rick Santorum is crazy, but to the distress of Mitt Romney and Karl Rove and other Republican Party elders, he is crazy like a fox.

I have yet to read a plausible scenario through which this right-wing upstart can beat President Obama. He wouldn't even be able to win Pennsylvania, where as an incumbent U.S. Senator he got throttled by 16 percentage points in 2006, the largest losing margin for a Senate incumbent in history. But grabbing the Republican nomination no longer seems like it is outside the realm of possibilities for the simple reason that Romney has proven to be a terrible candidate whose serial attempts to reinvent himself further reveal him to be an empty suit.

Unlike Romney, Santorum has no advance team and does no polling. But he is beginning to attract serious money while Romney, who has relied exclusively on wealthy donors, risks tapping out his campaign fund, which would mean he would have to reach into his own deep pockets. How bad are things for Romney? One pundit has taken to calling his campaign the Death Star.

The best hope for Romney, who trails Santorum badly in his native Michigan and not quite so badly in some national polls, is that Santorum loses his inhibitions and reveals himself more fully to be a demagogue and an extremist as he soars in the polls, and there are indications that is happening.

Speaking at a rally this week in Boise, Idaho, Santorum brought the crowd to its feet. They booed Senator John McCain, called Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg a traitor and reminded Santorum that American revolutionaries had more than muskets. Santorum in turn applauded them, declaring that "I believe that if we are unsuccessful in this election that we will have failed in that duty and it will have horrendous consequences. . . . It will be the end of the great experiment in the order of liberty and freedom."

This is exactly the kind of stuff that the Obama campaign loves to hear.

Combined with Santorum's more nuttier positions like opposing contraception and believing that a child conceived through a rape is a "gift from God," it would take little effort for the Obama machine to eviscerate him in the fall, while Santorum is forcing Romney to tack even further to the right, which would have dire consequences for him in the fall.

Photograph by Stephen Brashear/Getty Images

Cartoon du Jour

Matt Davies/Universal Press Syndicate

Birth Control Tempest Grows Sillier Still

Roman Catholic bishops oppose birth control. Many Republican congressfolk and some Democrats oppose birth control. All of the Republican presidential candidates, to one degree or another, oppose birth control. All this despite the fact that a strong majority of Americans are adamant about having the right to decide whether to use birth control and what method to use, and support the Obama administration's requirement that health insurance plans cover the cost of contraceptives for religiously-affiliated employers.

Let's put some perspective on the issue. We're not talking about cigarettes or alcohol here, and because of the attendant risks these addictive substances pose, government at the federal and state levels has every right to regulate their use. What we are talking about is devices and methods for sexually active individuals. These include male and female condoms, spermicides, diaphragms, IUDs, cervical caps, contraceptive sponges, as well as hormonal pills, patches, shots and implants. Then there is natural family planning and the morning-after pill, which pro-lifers regard as a form of abortion.

Beyond those bishops, who remain determinedly out of step with the American mainstream let alone many member of their flock who ignore the church's ban on contraceptives and so-called family values conservatives who believe that women should walk several steps behind their men, can it really be that John Boehner, Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan are against their wives managing their reproductive lives and planning when and whether to have children?

Can it really be that they object to Missus Boehner, Cantor and Ryan taking a sexually active teenage daughter, and a majority are sexually active regardless of their parents' political affiliation, to Planned Parenthood or another clinic for counseling and getting a prescription for birth control to prevent an unwanted pregnancy and, heaven forbid, an abortion?

The answer is of course not. But opposing birth control in general and a provision of the Affordable Care act mandating affordable access to contraceptive services and products in particular is the politic thing to do if you are a member of a party that considers their wives and daughters to be second class and have been handed a ready excuse to declare that President Obama is anti-religion, a claim that becomes sillier every time it is uttered.

The tempest over Catholic and other religious-affiliated hospitals and medical facilities being required to hew to the Affordable Care Act for their employees prompted the White House to offer a compromise in the form of outsourcing contraceptive services to non-sectarian providers, but the bishops and Republicans want to keep the issue alive for as long as they are able.

Incidentally, the overwhelming support for the Affordable Care Act provision extends to Catholics and polls taken since the tempest erupted show that they have not changed their overwhelmingly positive views of the president.

The timing of the tempest is no accident.

With the economy finally showing signs of recovering and Obama's approval ratings climbing back into the low 50s, Republicans and their presidential wannabes are being denied a cudgel that they have been swinging since Obama took office, so they are defaulting to the tried-and-true culture wars. That is, tried and true for them; most voters don't give a spit. And how ironic that the mandate that Republicans now so vehemently oppose was being promoted by them in 1993 as an alternative to HillaryCare.

Meanwhile, Darrell "Mr. Republican Oversight" Issa will convene a hearing tomorrow that he is choreographing as "Lines Crossed: Separation of Church and State. Has the Obama Administration Trampled on Freedom of Religion and Freedom of Conscience?" All nine witnesses will rail against the Obama administration while none of the religious groups supportive of the Affordable Care Act will be heard from.

As Andrew Sullivan, among others, has pointed out, Obama's greatest skill is in getting his opponents to overreach and self-destruct.

Rick Santorum, who actually believes he can win votes campaigning against contraception -- because birth control makes the gals sexual libertines, ya know -- will sooner or later hit a wall and you can be sure if he backs into the nomination, it will be a killer issue for him in the fall. As in a landslide loss.

In any event, I continue to believe that a compromise will be hammered out sooner or later, but not until the church and GOP have their fill of Obama bashing.

Cartoon du Jour

Stuart Carlson/Universal Press Syndicate

Onward Thru The Fog: Settling For A Mediocrity & Other Tales From The Crypt

And so we come -- perhaps inevitably -- to the moment in the battle for the Republican presidential nomination when party elders begin to suggest that settling for less than the best isn't so bad if the guy can somehow beat President Obama.

This pearl of wisdom comes from Grover Norquist, one of the key players in the marginalization of the GOP as a national force. Speaking last weekend at the annual CPAC sitdown in Washington, D.C., the head of the Americans for Tax Reform advocacy group all but called Mitt Romney, the presumptive nominee even after on-again, off-again thrashings by Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, a weak and passive mediocrity.

"All we have to do is replace Obama," Norquist said. "We are not auditioning for fearless leader. We don't need a president to tell us in what direction to go. We know what direction to go. We want the Ryan budget. . . . We just need a president to sign this stuff. We don't need someone to think it up or design it. The leadership now for the modern conservative movement for the next 20 years will be coming out of the House and the Senate."

Wait, it gets worse.

"Pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become president of the United States.," Norquist continued. "This is a change for Republicans: the House and Senate doing the work with the president signing bills. His job is to be captain of the team, to sign the legislation that has already been prepared."

How sad. How very sad.

HAPPY DAYS ARE KIND OF HERE AGAIN

Meanwhile, approval ratings for the man who occupies the Oval Office -- no mediocrity he -- are back in positive territory while congressional Republicans double down on the dumb.

The Talking Points Memo Poll Average has Barack Obama at slightly over 50 percent while recent approval polls for Congress and Republicans in particular hover around 10 percent. Obama's bump is a result of two months of decent economic numbers as well as a completed Iraq troop withdrawal and accelerated Afghanistan troop withdrawal.

COULD MITT BLOW IT IN MICHIGAN?

Even with Mitt Romney's ill-advised remarks that Detroit automakers should be allowed to fail, he was once a prohibitive favorite to win the Michigan primary on February 28 because he is, after all, a native of the state and his father was an extremely popular governor, but one poll now shows Rick Santorum leading him by a 15 percentage point margin.

More amazingly, Santorum leads Romney by a 40-21 percentage point margin among Democrats and independents who say they plan to vote in the state's open primary.

Slate's Dave Weigel finds this jaw dropping:

"What a difference a Republican primary makes! Now, Santorum is the de facto blue collar candidate (please pay no attention to his policies) running against a guy who gets the vapors when he fires people, an entertainingly pretentious figure from the 1990s Republican era, and Ron Paul. So of course he's the guy who appeals to moderates."

AND HOW ABOUT NATIONALLY?

Nationally, a New York Times/CBS News poll released this morning shows Rick Santorum surging among Republican primary voters nationwide in large part because of support for him among conservatives, evangelical Christians and Tea Party supporters.

Some 30 percent of Republican primary voters say they support Santorum compared with 27 percent for Mitt Romney, and while Santorum’s lead is essentially a tie with Romney because it is within the margin of sampling error, it reflects a significant jump for him from earlier polls.

The two other major candidates are trailing badly with Ron Paul at 12 percent and Newt Gingrich at 10 percent.

Meanwhile, a Pew poll released Monday shows that those all-important independents are abandoning Romney and some are flocking to Barack Obama.

A month ago, 40 percent of independents said they would back Obama over Romney, while 51 percent now say they would support Obama with Romney slipping from 50 percent to 42 percent.

THE MOST VULNERABLE CONGRESSFOLK

Politico has identified the five most vulnerable House incumbents, and it should be no surprise that four of the five are Republicans. Yes, 15 months after the GOP recaptured the House, it is scrambling to retain these seats and others as well.

The four most vulnerable Republicans aare: Spencer Bachus of Alabama, Tim Murphy of Pennsylvania, Fred Upton of Michigan, and Paul Gosar of Arizona. The most vulnerable Democrat is Edolphus Towns of New York.

THE DOG ATE MY MEMOIRS

Candidates have been distancing themselves from what they might have once said or written since forever, and Rick Santorum is no exception.

Santorum wrote in his 2005 book, It Takes a Family, that "radical feminists" are to be disparaged for giving women the idea that they might find greater fulfillment outside the home, but when confronted on that snippet on the ABC News show "This Week," he replied, "That's a new quote to me."

Which prompted New York Times op-ed columnist Frank Bruni to opine:

"To understand voters’ bottomless cynicism, look no farther than politicians’ boundless revisionism. Republicans have no monopoly on it, but they occupy center stage at the moment, shedding culpability for past deeds even as they ask us — as leaders do and should — to take responsibility for our own."

Photograph by Nicholas Kamm/Getty Images