Cliff Notes from Saturday's Times

The Times is really on the ball today.

• It is becoming clear that perhaps Bush’s exit strategy from Iraq is WAR WITH IRAN?? Yet: Doubts Persist on Iran Nuclear Arms Goals? Did ol’ Colin stiff us one last time on his way out the door? What in sam hell is going on here? This is truly frightening. On the one hand, it makes a certain amount of perverse sense, but on the other, why exchange one disaster we already know for one we don’t that likely will make us think in retrospect, that Baghdad really WAS a cakewalk? I, for one, will not be sending flowers to Dick Cheney.
  
  
• Errol Morris has a philosophical take on the nature of the medium of photography and its role in both Abu Ghraib and the new scandal out of Fallujah, turning to both Shakespeare and Vietnam to make sense of what’s happening now. An excellent read.
  
  Meanwhile, Israel may have its own mini Abu Ghraib a brewin'.
  
  
• And the war begins! House and Senate negotiators have tucked a potentially far-reaching anti-abortion provision into a must-pass spending bill. You gotta hand it to 'em, they don’t rest for a minute. I won’t get all into this right now. This is a sensitive topic on which reasonable people disagree. But the zeal of the anti-abortion crowd portends a rather stormy four more years.
  
  
• Kristof offers a few great ideas to fix our election system. Just because there’s a chance better than half that the 2004 election was, in fact, legitimate and unstolen does not mean that the system ain’t broke. He also highlights the disturbingly high percentage of Congressmen who run unopposed in their districts. And the good doctor’s prescription? Nonpartisan experts to redraw gerrymandered Congressional maps, the abolition of the Electoral College (amen, there are a great many reasons to do this), and the funding of campaigns through blind trusts, so pols won’t know to whom they’re beholden. All extremely logical, common sense solutions which don’t have a chance in hell of passing in today’s Congress.
  
  
• House ethics committee has ruled that a Democratic lawmaker exaggerated in the accusations he brought in June against majority leader Tom DeLay. Ah yes, the Michael Moore syndrome. Though 99% of Fahrenheit 9/11 was accurate, it was not unimpeachable, and Republicans naturally seized on that other 1% and successfully discredited the film in the eyes of many. These kinds of things are inexcusable: they hurt the cause and they’re unnecessary. Why exaggerate with Delay when the guy is one scandal away from finally paying for his transgressions?
  
  
• Rod Paige, the education secretary ... told Bush he would prefer to leave by the end of the first presidential term in January to pursue a long-planned 'personal project,' which an aide later identified as a remodeling of his house."
  
  - The Associated Press, Nov. 15.