No, really? What a surprise.

Apparently President Karzai didn't get the email from Karl:

Mr. Karzai said deadly riots in Afghanistan last week were not directly related to a Newsweek magazine article, which has since been retracted, that said a military inquiry would report that a copy of the Koran had been flushed down a toilet at the American prison camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. At least 17 people were killed during the riots.

"Those demonstrations were in reality not related to the Newsweek story," the Afghan president said. "They were more against the elections in Afghanistan. They were more against the progress in Afghanistan. They were more against the strategic partnership with the United States. We know who did it. We know the guys. We know the people behind those demonstrations."

Hmm, the President of Aghanistan says it wasn't about the article, and the Pentagon guy on the scene said it wasn't about the article, but in the meantime, a media source that was critical of the administration has gotten a smackdown and public humiliation. In the process, the administration has managed to avoid really discussing the details of Guantanamo. As Popeye might say, what a co-inky-dink!

Don't hold your breath waiting for Scott McClellan to issue a retraction of what he said about Newsweek.

Terry Neal in the Washington Post presents a handy overview of this Rovian tactic, which simultaneously focusses the public discussion around something tangential, casts a chilling effect over other potentially-critical media sources, and prevents the serious issues about the administration from being discussed.

When the media finish scrutinizing Newsweek, it should get back to asking tough questions of the Bush administration. Questions like:

• Who should be held responsible for the faulty intelligence on weapons of mass destruction that led the United States to declare war against Iraq?
  
  
• Why has the president not apologized for warning America that Iraq presented an imminent threat, when that turned out [not] to be the case?
  
  
• Will Rumsfeld, who claimed prior to the war to know the precise locations of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, personally apologize to the families of the troops who died in the search for those weapons?
  
  
• Given that McClellan has suggested that Newsweek editors need to go on Arab TV and explain and apologize for their errors, will Bush also go on Arab television to explain and apologize for the mistakes made in gathering and analyzing the pre-war intelligence?
  
  
• Will the administration, which downplayed the costs of the war in Iraq, publicly apologize to taxpayers now that the costs have already exceeded $300 billion?

In the meantime, the Newsweek thing will go into the Bushist mythology, proving yet again that the media is a liberal elite that can't be trusted.

Speaking of elements in the Bushist mythology, how about that whole "they weren't misleading us on Iraq, they just got bad intelligence" meme? That was never credible to those of us who were paying attention at the time, but it's been pretty conclusively disproven since, even before the Downing Street Memo. Walter Pincus summed it up pretty well this weekend, despite his editors burying the story on page 26.

Moreover, a close reading of the recent 600-page report by the president's commission on intelligence, and the previous report by the Senate panel, shows that as war approached, many U.S. intelligence analysts were internally questioning almost every major piece of prewar intelligence about Hussein's alleged weapons programs.

These included claims that Iraq was trying to obtain uranium in Africa for its nuclear program, had mobile labs for producing biological weapons, ran an active chemical weapons program and possessed unmanned aircraft that could deliver weapons of mass destruction. All these claims were made by Bush or then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in public addresses even though, the reports made clear, they had yet to be verified by U.S. intelligence agencies.

And, as we now know, they hadn't been verified because they weren't true.

As one frog said to the other in the pot, "Does it seem like it's getting warm in here?"