You can't make stuff like this up.

It's not enough that Donald Rumsfeld thinks we can deal with the insurgency in Iraq by renaming it.

Now, we're transplanting American values into Iraq--by cloning the Washington press corps. But we're going them one better (every once in a while a Washington reporter stumbles on something interesting--can't have that). We're actually having our military people write stories, hiring an expensive consultant to translate them into Arabic, and paying newspapers to run them.

Now, that's just more of the same for the Bush League, but here's what I find hopeful: we've managed to inculcate American values so much that one editor said that if he had known the stories had originated with the US military, he would have "charged much, much more".

Isn't that heartwarming?