It's bizarro world today. The Spin is on.

Update: How could I forget to mention John Kerry's "puff puff give" moment, which my man Franz blogged over at MfA. Laughable and bizarre.

The conservative Club for Growth is launching a truly bizzare attack ad aimed at my man Howard Dean in Iowa:

In the ad, a farmer says he thinks that "Howard Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading ..." before the farmer's wife then finishes the sentence: "... Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs."

So they're trying to stoke up irrational Dean hatred based purely on canards and prejudice, or they're secretly trying to sabotage his opponents. I honestly don't know which, but there's little doubt that something is happening here. Vacation is over and the wheels are in motion.

At the other end of the media spectrum, David Brooks pens an NYT column which essentially suggests anyone who complains about the PNAC and the cabal of Hawks who continue to lobby for war without end is an anti-semetic conspiracy theorist.

The full-mooners fixated on a think tank called the Project for the New American Century, which has a staff of five and issues memos on foreign policy. To hear these people describe it, PNAC is sort of a Yiddish Trilateral Commission, the nexus of the sprawling neocon tentacles...

...there are apparently millions of people who cling to the notion that the world is controlled by well-organized and malevolent forces. And for a subset of these people, Jews are a handy explanation for everything.

It's funny, because I remember not too long ago -- oh, say, before the war in Iraq was revealed to be a quagmire prosecuted on fraudulent grounds -- people were all abuzz (in a positive way) about the neo con movement, how they were winning the foreign policy contests 100 to nothing. People were gearing up to write books about this new era of governance, until it turned out to be the same old imperial bullshit. Now Brooks politely informs us that any "neo-con movement" is a figment of our (likely jew-hating) imaginations.

Pardon me if I take a second helping of umbrage, yo. The piece would be laughable if it didn't contain the skeevy anti-semetic twist. Brooks claims that the neo cons travel in widely different circles -- yet acknowledges that many of them work at the same magazine, and often "sat around guffawing" at the "ludicrous stories" that kept popping up. He downplays the significance of Dick Perle, saying he had no significant meetins w/Bush or Cheny, but doesn't mention Wolfowitz's trips to Crawford.

Now, I don't think these people run the government, but the invasion of Iraq was clearly something they'd been pushing for quite a while. If Brook's attempt to sideline any discussion of how this group may have influenced US foreign policy by labelling any such notions anti-semetic is any indication as to what we've got to look forward to, it's gonna be a hell of a spin cycle. Welcome to the front, muchachos. The race of 2004 has begun.