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In the music biz, a popular tune that quickly becomes unpopular because it’s been played to death is said to have “high burn.” Listeners burn out due to overexposure. (The classic example is Debbie Boone’s recording of “You Light Up My Life.” I’m old, okay?)

PERRspectives Blog reports the top 10 Bush sound bites, and the administration may be setting new records for burn rate:

With the Karl Rove PlameGate scandal now in high gear, the Bush White House and the GOP leadership as usual have everyone singing the same tune. Over the last three weeks, their latest smash sound bite hit, “Don’t Prejudge An Ongoing Investigation”, has jumped to the top of the charts

Remember JibJab’s animated parody last year of Woody Guthrie’s classic “This Land is Your Land,” with new lyrics like this?

Bush: You’re a liberal sissy.
Kerry: You’re a right-wing nut-job.

Who could forget? Oh, how we laughed!

Media Matters for America just mentioned a short promotional animation they had done some time ago. I had never seen it before, but it’s chock full of right-wing nut-jobs. Check it out here.

Terrorism has been very, very good to George W. Bush. And it seems there’s an emerging international consensus that George W. Bush has been very, very good for terrorism. From Think Progress:

Three separate intelligence reports – the British intelligence agency, a Saudi intelligence analysis, and an Israeli report – contradict Bush’s view that we have to “defeat them abroad before they attack us at home.” The emerging consensus is that the occupation of Iraq is inspiring people around the world to join the ranks of the terrorists.

Think Progress also takes a nostalgic look back at the Bush administration’s pre-war predictions that post-war reconstruction in Iraq would cost less than $2 billion. Boy, those were the good ol’ days.

Billmon is kinda over the top about right-wing pundit Ann Coulter, calling her Ilse Koch, after the wife of the commandant of Buchenwald. (I mention this to make his article easier to understand if you follow the link.) But he reads that Coulter has reservations about Supreme Court nominee John Roberts, and that gives him an idea:

Since the guy is probably going to be confirmed anyway, maybe the Dems should praise him instead of slamming him. Talk about his tolerance and his respect for diversity. Congratulate Bush for picking such a moderate, fair-minded jurist — one who has already testified that Roe v Wade is “settled law.” Tell the world they’re overjoyed the president selected a nominee who can reach across the partisan divide, instead of some extremist skin job with a radical religious agenda. Smother Roberts in some hot, juicy Demo love.

Say that kind of stuff often and loud enough, and it might plant some seeds of doubt in those tiny wing-nut minds: “If the filthy ’rats like him so much, he mus’ be some kinda librul.”

Who knows? If enough of the “base” starts talking like [Ann Coulter], it might even force Roberts and his GOP support team to drop the warm and cuddly spin, and demonstrate just how much of a hardliner the guy really is — thereby stripping some of the radar cloaking off the Stealth nominee. But frantic efforts to polish up Roberts’s ultaright credentials might further feed wing nut paranoia about the guy: “If he’s one of us, how come they gotta keep defendin’ him alla time? And why don’ his forehead slope down like ourn?”

Animated political thriller from Mark Fiore: Double Super-Secret Background.

You will believe a man can lie.

Media Matters lists top Supreme Court myths, falsehoods and distortions, and debunks each of them. The following is only a listing. Go to the site to see how to challenge each of these claims:

Since Justice Sandra Day O’Connor announced her retirement from the Supreme Court on July 1, conservatives have formulated or resurrected numerous false and misleading claims about the high court, which some in the media have all too willingly repeated without challenge. With President Bush’s anticipated nomination announcement later today, some of these claims are sure to resurface, and Media Matters for America will be on the lookout for new “Supreme distortions” that will undoubtedly emerge.

1. Robert Bork was “smeared” when he was nominated for the Supreme Court…
2. Democrats will oppose any nominee President Bush picks…
3. In questioning nominees, Democrats will treat them with disrespect and hostility…
4. Roe v. Wade is not threatened by O’Connor’s retirement…
5. Democrats should follow “Ginsburg precedent” by accepting a Bush nominee despite significant ideological differences…
6. Democrats are divided on whether ideology constitutes an “extraordinary circumstance” under Senate agreement on filibusters…
7. Bush favors conservatives who will strictly interpret the law over judicial activists who legislate from the bench…

There are some things you just can’t get from a book.

Magazines like Life and Look ran huge, beautiful photo spreads when Apollo 8, the first manned journey to the moon, brought back pictures like this.

We’ve all seen these photos. The images are so familiar now that it’s hard to understand that there was a time when they were astonishing and disorienting — a time when it seemed they just might revolutionize earthbound thinking.

I’ve spent many hours gazing at those photos. They show us ourselves, from a new perspective. Yet, I think my understanding falls short. We can’t adequately grasp this view of the world by looking at photographs. To fully understand it, I think, we must see it through a window. We must see it with our own eyes.

Earthbound thinking is tough to revolutionize.

Thirty-six years ago today, human beings first touched down on the moon in the Sea of Tranquility.

Most of the world’s population today were born after the landing. A man on the moon is not a hopeful futuristic idea, but a half-forgotten historical event.

In his autobiography, Last Man on the Moon, astronaut Eugene Cernan writes:

Sometimes it seems that Apollo came before its time. President Kennedy reached far into the twenty-first century, grabbed a decade of time and slipped it neatly into the 1960s and 1970s. Logic dictates that after Mercury and Gemini, we should have proceeded to build the shuttle, then an orbiting space station, and only then sought the Moon. As it was, we accomplished the impossible, then started over again.

Here are lunar panoramas and photographs from the Apollo missions.

Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter:

Like a lot of President Bush’s critics, I supported the Iraq war at first. Because of the evidence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction laid out by Colin Powell, I agreed that we needed to disarm Saddam Hussein. I even think it’s possible that 25 years from now, historians will conclude that the Iraq war helped accelerate the modernizing of the Middle East, even if it doesn’t fully democratize it.

But if that happens, Bush might not get as much credit as he hopes, and not just because most historians, as Richard Nixon liked to say, are liberals. Bush may look bad because his leadership on Iraq has been a fiasco. He didn’t plan for it: the early decisions that allowed the insurgency to get going were breathtakingly incompetent. He didn’t pay for it: Bush is the first president in history to cut taxes during a war, this one now costing nearly $1 billion a week. And most important of all, he didn’t tell the American people the truth about it: taking a nation to war is the most solemn duty of a president, and he’d better make certain there’s no alternative and no doubt about the evidence.

Why do I mention this now? Because for all of the complexities of the Valerie Plame case, for all the questions raised about the future of investigative journalism and the fate of the most influential aide to an American president since Louis Howe served Franklin D. Roosevelt 70 years ago, this story is fundamentally about how easy it was to get into Iraq and how hard it will be to get out.

We got in because we “cooked” the intelligence, then hyped it. That’s why the “Downing Street Memo” is not a smoking gun but a big “duh.” For two years we’ve known that senior White House officials were determined to, in the words of the British intelligence memo, “fix” the intelligence to suit their policy decisions. When someone crossed them, they would “fix” him, too, as career ambassador Joseph Wilson found when he came back from Africa with a report that threw cold water on the story that Saddam Hussein sought yellowcake uranium from Niger.

…

The bigger question is what this scandal does to the CIA’s ability to develop essential “humint” (human intelligence). Here’s where the Iraq war comes in again. The sooner we beef up our intelligence, the sooner we crack the insurgency and get to bring our troops home. What does it say to the people doing the painstaking work of building those spy networks when the identity of one of their own becomes just another weapon in the partisan wars of Washington? For a smart guy, Karl Rove was awfully stupid.

Carl Bernstein on the Daily Show:

Now, everything has become part of an ideological war, and more energy and thought is going into that ideological war — against the Democrats particularly, but some of it comes back the other way — than into fighting terrorists.

I mean, really, they’re so far off the ball in what the real game is at this point. It is about destroying the other side, and serving the country has become incidental.

Annie Lamott:

It’s a fairly common saying among sober alcoholics that the reason they finally quit drinking was that, by the end, they were getting sicker faster than they could lower their standards.

Annie’s piece recalls a scene that runs through Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, slowly revealed. One character tries to help a wounded comrade and realizes, in an utterly harrowing moment, that things are much worse than they seem. (If you’ve read the book, you will remember the scene.)

[T]here were so many revelations and so much brilliant writing this weekend, that you could’t help but think that this nation is just beginning to notice the [first evidence that things are much worse than they seem.]

Ed Kilgore on the Irresponsibility Era:

Recall George W. Bush’s meta-message during the 2000 campaign: it was time for a “responsibility era” to rein in the excesses introduced by the out-of-control Baby Boomer Bill Clinton. The grown-ups, emblemized by Dick Cheney and other Bush 41 exiles, were ready to give America a mature and accountable government.

That has turned out to be the biggest Bush lie of them all.

With precious few exceptions, this administration has been characterized by a recklessness and irresponsibility that could barely have been matched if the country had been turned over to actual adolescents.

The Swing State Project has a DNC press release about the record of the Republican smear machine. The following is only a summary. Lots more details are at the Swing State Project site. (I couldn’t find this press release on the DNC site.)

THE REPUBLICAN SMEAR MACHINE CONSTANTLY IN MOTION

Republicans follow a tried and true tactic of attacking, smearing, and sliming anyone who might get in their way or threaten their political survival. Their ongoing effort to discredit Joe Wilson and their destruction of his wife’s career is just the latest in a long line of questionable tactics that the Bush Administration, Karl Rove, and Ken Mehlman consistently use to protect themselves and ensure their continued political power.

ARMY CHIEF OF STAFF PUNISHED FOR TROOP LEVEL ASSESSMENT

Shinseki Punished For Honest Assessment Of Troop Levels Needed In Iraq; Retribution Intimidated Commanders…

FORMER COUNTER-TERRORISM CHIEF SMEARED FOR CRITICISMS

Richard Clarke Smeared After Talking About White House Lackadaisical Attitude Towards Al-Qaeda…

TREASURY SECRETARY FIRED FOR OPPOSITION TO TAX CUTS

O’Neill Fired For Expressing Misgivings Over Bush’s Additional Tax Cuts…

ECONOMIC ADVISER FORCED TO RESIGN

Lindsey Forced to Resign After Citing Large Cost of Iraq War. White House economic adviser Larry Lindsey annoyed the White House in September 2002 when he suggested that war with Iraq would cost between $100 billion and $200 billion, an estimate Administration officials insisted was too high…

ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS DIRECTOR FIRED FOR BUDGET CRITICISM…

PARK POLICE CHIEF FIRED FOR CRITICM OF BUSH POLICY…

REPORTER SMEARED FOR REPORTING ON TROOP MORALE

ABC News Reporter Smeared By Bush Administration For Documenting Low Troop Morale…

INS AGENTS DEMOTED FOR POINTING OUT LAX SECURITY…

Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) Agents Mark Hall and Robert Linderman were demoted from their positions after they told reporters that United States security at Canadian borders was lax…

Smears, demotions, firings. This administration rewards failure and punishes competence and truth-telling.

In furtherance of a White House smear, Karl Rove leaked the identity of an undercover CIA agent, and Bush is “moving the goalposts” so Rove can stay. Josh Marshall wants more specificity:

My first question is whether the rule applies merely to indictment or whether conviction is necessary to trigger dismissal. And as I mentioned on TPM, can a staffer continue to work while their case is taken up on appeal?

Oh, they’ll keep moving the goalposts, as needed. That’s a fundamental part of this administration’s M.O.

Tom Tomorrow poses a simple question for Rove’s defenders:

If everything he did was aboveboard and beyond reproach, why has the administration consistently lied about it for two years?

Richard Clarke, formerly the U.S. government’s top anti-terror expert, talks about the Bush Administration on the Al Franken Show:

What they’re saying is, anybody who wants to ask analytical questions is a Democrat, and is trying to subvert the president, and is unpatriotic, and is a liberal. And probably, gave money to MoveOn.org. That’s what they say. They just won’t discuss, they won’t debate on the facts.

…

You just ask questions, and they smear you.

(Poster swiped (with permission) from the Propaganda Remix Project. Much more at the site.)

This post at Think Progress details how to shoot down Rovegate lies.