TODAY'S TOP FIVE: A Bicyle of Truth confounding a President of Lies.

He Knows Geographic Terms and Everything! So, who saw Bush's speech last night? I missed it because I was working, but I did catch the sad aftermath, where the press corps trots out phonies like Bob Woodward to clean up after the president, much like circus workers who follow elephants around with shovels. Woodward assured us that the speech was important because it "showed the president is thinking very seriously about this issue" (really? The president is thinking very seriously about a war he started? Well, that's quite an improvement over FDR, who forgot about World War II on Dec. 8, 1941 and only followed it by listening to Spike Jones songs!) and that another indication of the president's competence was that in his speech, he "knew the names of various geographic locations." That's correct: the president was praised for being able to read a map.

Who's Going to Be the Patsy? Forget the seven hapless rednecks whose wrists will be slapped for torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib: the real question is, will any high-level officials have to fall on their sword? So far, Rumsfeld has weathered the storm, meaning that attention now falls to the Army itself. Brigadier General Janis Karpinski now seems like she won't jump on the grenade, saying she was "set up" by the Army to take the fall for what happened at Abu Ghraib.

History, My Friends, is Bunk Crazy Henry Ford said it decades ago, and stupid George Bush keeps acting it out again and again. Here's a good deconstruction, by Slate's William Saletan, of the near-pathological flaws in Bush's speech last night.

Hey, At Least Khatami Was Actually Elected President If the fears of US intelligence serives are true, then the people we should protest the war to are the fools in the Bush administration, but rather the shadowy spooks in the Iranian intelligence service. An investigation is now being frantically carried out to discern whether Iran spent five years pumping Western intelligence agencies with bogus info through Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress in order to depose the hated Saddam and establish a Shi'ite theocracy in Iraq. Larry Johnson, a former senior counter-terrorist official at the state department, says: "When the story ultimately comes out we'll see that Iran has run one of the most masterful intelligence operations in history. They persuaded the US and Britain to dispose of its greatest enemy." This article also reveals that the Chalabi Lobby, which yesterday doubled in size, has now expanded again: Laurie Mylroie, a lunatic "journalist" and neocon flack who believes that Iraq carried out the Oklahoma City bombing, is still firmly in the corner of Citizen Chalabi.

Here's Your Hat, What's Your Hurry? Iraq's "defense minister" said today that he expects all foreign troops will be out of the country within a year after the "transfer of power." The Iraqi army will be up and running within a matter of months he said, making the presence of foreign soldiers unneccessary by the scheduled national elections in January 2005. It was not revealed at press time whether the defense minister is a drug addict, mentally ill, or simply an idiot. More on this as it develops.

-Consider Arms