Happy talk, scapegoating and the liquefaction of the definition of "progress." When the White House clumsily reveals the settings on its Iraq auto-pilot, such as when lower echelon spokespersons handle a daily briefing, you can better appreciate the importance of the briefing book and the skill with which the bigger players use it for their lockstep, off the cuff responses.

Nobody wonders any more why only Dick Cheney doesn't use one.

This week's happy talk was that numbers of sectarian killings were down, but as Martha Raddatz pointed out on Washington Week, the number of bound, gagged, shot in the head bodies being found is indeed down, but the civilian deaths as a result of more random sectarian violence was actually up.

Dick Cheney's May trip to the area produced that same cheery statistic, though the Times reported that he left unmentioned that US casualties were simultaneously up.

Recall that Ms. Rice had paid a visit the previous week in May and, by including Syrians and Iranians in her itinerary, may have sent signals which differed from Dick Cheney's play book.

This week's announcement of an arms deal has fleshed out what Tony Snow at the time referred to as "...conversations that are candid, that are detailed, that are respectful."

Establishing hegemony in the Middle East, at the time, was advertised by Dick Cheney as a trip the president asked him to take. You know, to "reaffirm our commitment to our friends in the region that we're here to stay and that we look forward to working with them to deal with mutual threats."

That week, the news for mass consumption centered around the supposedly renegade Republicans who had dared visit the White House with some apprehensions, mostly to do with Iraq and re-electability.

Somehow, when push came to shove, the Republicans joined ranks to prevent a super-majority.

If you suspect a charade at work here, more strongly than might Chertoff's gut let's say, then it began in the overnight of the Republican "thumping."

Let there be all the talk of what the voters had said about no longer supporting the war that anyone might care to intimate; there will be no change in course unless and until the Democrats can be pinned with a cause for failure. Yank the plug or shut up, to put it bluntly.

The charade includes exaggerated stories of pressure for immediate and irresponsible withdrawal from Iraq, from back home in the mostly blue states and from the usual suspects among the emperor is naked crowd. The first round of scapegoating followed the illusion of a White House's suspenseful waiting for a report by elder statesmen and (forget that it took firing or "re-deploying" a few of them) the go-ahead from generals. All that drama for this surge gizmo. Insidiously, there was an accompanying portrayal of a rush to failure on the part of anyone who would not be so strung along.

Frank Rich has detailed the abdication of delineated presidential powers simultaneous with the assertion of ones not found in the Constitution. Writing last Sunday about his ascendancy to virtual commander in chief, Rich said "...the Petraeus phenomenon is not about protecting the troops or American interests but about protecting the president."

In an op/ed at the Times, two Brookings Institute scholars gave a rosy report after spending eight embedded days in country. Reporters in the know, while not faulting the observation and writing talents of the authors, suggested that there may be something similar to plastic turkeys at work here when the two wrote they "were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily 'victory' but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with." No wonder the White House is happy to quote from the New York Times just this once.

Reporters such as Anne Nivat, as related at TomDispatch, have found a much different Iraq by moving in with ordinary denizens, not Green Zone hospitality specialists.

Brookings' own Iraq Index showed just one change in their eight most important benchmarks between May and August.

"July 2007: PM Nouri al-Maliki stated publicly that provincial elections would be held by the end of calendar year 2007."

Oh goody! All the remaining benchmarks which had already been downwardly defined from "victory" and "greeted as liberators" in the years since war's outset, are unchanged.

"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows," sang Bob Dylan. Iraq and the entire Middle East will experience a continuing hegemonic front accompanied by a monsoon of tears for the needlessly dead. Crawford, TX will be sunny through September.