Lindsay’s dad has passed on.  Very sorry to hear it.

Well, for his abruptly disappearing website, anyway.

Glenn Greenwald notes that thanks to the mass media adoption of more nonsense from the White House, everyone we fight in Iraq is now "Al-Qaeda."

Never mind that Al-Qaeda-aligned foreigners have never comprised more than a tiny minority of combatants.  But demonize and blur the motives of everyone else, and you get to look righteous by comparison, especially if nobody knows any better.

It’s a desperate move by the White House, indicating awareness of how untenable the U.S. position has become.  And it’s appalling that so much of the media is still going along for the ride.

Greenwald’s second post on the subject is here.

On a related subject, Think Progress points out a galling new Newsweek poll: 41 percent of Americans now believe incorrectly that Saddam was involved in 9-11.  That number is rising, not falling.  Four years after the invasion, reality does not yet intrude on the minds of two Americans in five.

For all our enjoyment of CNN’s mislocation of Afghanistan, we also know that CNN has not made that mistake before, and they almost certainly will not again.

But Greenwald catches them repeating the blatant Al Qaeda distortion, an absolute falsehood they and the rest of the media continue to propagate.

Thanks to such rubbish, plus our own comfortable complicity, at least 40 percent of Americans still have no functional understanding of a four-year-old war.

My buddy Scott suggests what Cheney would have been like during the Eisenhower years:

I have a lot of strangers to thank today.

I don’t know how the bloody hell people who work in hospitals handle literal life and death in their care every day. I wish I did. I wish I had that kind of strength. Maybe it’s the joy of helping people get better, the sense of self-worth and just basic human goddam love that gets people through the pressure and the secret fears of failure and the occasional horror of seeing those fears come true.

And I don’t know where scientists find the persistence and cleverness to contrive remedies that not only attack but fight off counterattacks from hostile beings in a literally molecule-by-molecule theater of war. They don’t get thanked nearly enough, but they save lives every day.

But I do know this: somewhere out there, right this minute, are some labcoated people whom I will never meet, and in this moment, I actually love them. I swear to God that I do. I am grateful. I want to take them out for a beer and hear their stories and help them move heavy stuff and look the other way when they’re jerks because I know they’re really not.

Those of you who’ve read Prisoner of Trebekistan know that we’ve had some hairy moments in the family back in Ohio. I’ve been a little worried lately about the most recent one. Actually, a lot worried. I think the only real reason I distracted myself with The Sopranos for a day or two there, even though (as long-term readers here know full well) I usually don’t even care much about that kind of pop culture thing, has been so I had something else I could think about. Besides what I was thinking about. Which I really didn’t want to think about.

But I think now everything might be OK. I think.

In any case, I only regret that the people who invent and engage these magnificent molecular contraptions we call modern medicines will probably never hear how grateful I am for their work.

But I am. I truly am.

I complain like hell about the American health care system here sometimes, and rightly so. Whether you’d prefer a Canadian system or a French system or such, or even if you think the whole everything-for-profit model is the reason we have these medicines, whatever, you wouldn’t disagree that we really could do things here even better, and probably a lot better. I wish it could be the sort of national crusade and discussion too often reserved for whether to blow something up.

But this post isn’t about economics or a political debate. This isn’t about people with M.B.A.s and J.D.s. This is about M.D.s and Ph.D.s. And R.N.s and M.S.N.s.

If you read this, and you know a doctor or a molecular biologist or a caregiving nurse or someone young who really wants to be one, please hug the holy crap out of them today. I mean it. Tell them someone they don’t even know is grateful.

Thanks.