The only thing more predictable than Americans' jubilation over the killing of Osama Bin Laden is the Republican campaign to give George W. Bush credit for it. Sadly for the right-wing propaganda machine, as Stephen Colbert warned President Bush five years ago, "reality has a well-known liberal bias." Bush, after all, shrugged off Bin Laden's escape after the U.S. failure at Tora Bora by proclaiming, "I truly am not that concerned about him." And it was President Obama who as promised tripled American resources in Afghanistan and authorized unilateral strikes without the permission of Pakistan.

But you'd never know it from the conservative voices celebrating the death of Bin Laden eight years to the day after President Bush declared "Mission Accomplished" aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. While GOP leaders like Eric Cantor couldn't bring themselves to credit Barack Obama by name, John Yoo, Karl Rove, Rep. Steve King and other cheerleaders for the Bush torture team dubiously claimed so-called enhanced interrogation techniques like waterboarding provided the vital information leading to Bin Laden's killing.

But it was former Bush Defense Secretary and serial fabulist (see, for example, here and here) Donald Rumsfeld who regurgitated the GOP talking point in its purest form:

"All of this was made possible by the relentless, sustained pressure on al Qaeda that the Bush administration initiated after 9/11 and that the Obama administration has wisely chosen to continue."

Of course, Rumsfeld's revisionist history is untrue. More pathetic still, he knows it is untrue.

For starters, it was Donald Rumsfeld himself who cancelled the 2005 U.S. special forces operation designed to "snatch and grab" Ayman Al Zawahiri and other senior Al Qaeda leaders. The story, following July 2006 revelations that the CIA had previously disbanded its Bin Laden unit, gives lie to one of the central tenets of the so-called Bush Doctrine: no safe havens for terrorists. As the New York Times reported in July 2007, Rumsfeld ran roughshod over then CIA Director Porter Goss, scuttling the mission at the last moment even as the U.S. forces were boarding planes for the assault:

But the mission was called off after Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, rejected an 11th-hour appeal by Porter J. Goss, then the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, officials said. Members of a Navy Seals unit in parachute gear had already boarded C-130 cargo planes in Afghanistan when the mission was canceled, said a former senior intelligence official involved in the planning.

Mr. Rumsfeld decided that the operation, which had ballooned from a small number of military personnel and C.I.A. operatives to several hundred, was cumbersome and put too many American lives at risk, the current and former officials said. He was also concerned that it could cause a rift with Pakistan, an often reluctant ally that has barred the American military from operating in its tribal areas, the officials said.

In contrast, candidate Barack Obama was crystal clear that he would unilaterally strike Al Qaeda targets in Pakistan with or without permission from Islamabad.

In August 2007, as you'll recall, Senator Obama received a hellstorm of criticism for his statements regarding attacking Al Qaeda bases in Pakistan. As part of a broad - and forceful - foreign policy speech on August 1, Obama rightly took the Bush administration to task for the failure of its "no safe havens" doctrine in Pakistan. Regarding the Al Qaeda sanctuary safely nestled along the Afghan border, Obama declared:

"If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will."

And while Republican presidential candidate John McCain in February 2008 blasted Obama's advocacy of unilateral American attacks against Al Qaeda targets in Pakistan, by the beginning of that year the Bush administration itself was already carrying them out.

From almost the inception of his campaign, Obama argued that the diversion of U.S. military assets from Afghanistan to Iraq meant that "the people who were responsible for murdering 3,000 Americans on 9/11 have not been brought to justice." In a June speech, Obama highlighted McCain's denial of this inescapable point:

"We had al Qaeda and the Taliban on the run back in 2002. But then we diverted military, intelligence, financial, and diplomatic resources to Iraq. And yet Senator McCain has said as recently as this April that, 'Afghanistan is not in trouble because of our diversion to Iraq.' I think that just shows a dangerous misjudgment of the facts, and a stubborn determination to ignore the need to finish the fight in Afghanistan."

During a major national security address on July 15, 2008, candidate Obama restated his case:

"The greatest threat to that security lies in the tribal regions of Pakistan, where terrorists train and insurgents strike into Afghanistan. We cannot tolerate a terrorist sanctuary, and as President, I won't. We need a stronger and sustained partnership between Afghanistan, Pakistan and NATO to secure the border, to take out terrorist camps, and to crack down on cross-border insurgents. We need more troops, more helicopters, more satellites, more Predator drones in the Afghan border region. And we must make it clear that if Pakistan cannot or will not act, we will take out high-level terrorist targets like bin Laden if we have them in our sights."

Throughout the summer and fall of 2008, the Pentagon and U.S. commanders in the field made clear they agreed with both Barack Obama's assessment of the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan and his call for deploying additional resources there.

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Amato wrote earlier today that he wondered why the media didn't report on McChrystal's coverup of Pat Tillman's death. Well, every once in a while, Howard Kurtz actually reveals something useful about the media Village mindset:

One journalistic question to emerge from Rolling Stone's takedown of Stanley McChrystal is whether a military beat reporter could have -- or would have -- done it. Michael Hastings was on a one-time assignment; he didn't need to deal with the general and his people again. This, by the way, is no different than the tension faced by every city hall and statehouse reporter versus someone coming in for a one-shot piece.

Hastings himself addressed the question in a 2008 GQ piece, talking about being embedded as a presidential campaign reporter:

"The dance with staffers is a perilous one. You're probably not going to get much, if any, one-on-one time with the candidate, which means your sources of information are the people who work for him. So you pretend to be friendly and nonthreatening, and over time you 'build trust,' which everybody involved knows is an illusion. If the time comes, if your editor calls for it, you're supposed to [expletive] them over."

Pretend? Not a pretty picture.

NYU journalism professor and blogger Jay Rosen pivots toward Politico's coverage of the McChrystal affair:

"In one of the many articles The Politico ran about the episode, the following observation was made by reporters Gordon Lubold and Carol E. Lee:

"McChrystal, an expert on counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, has long been thought to be uniquely qualified to lead in Afghanistan. But he is not known for being media savvy. Hastings, who has covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for two years, according to the magazine, is not well-known within the Defense Department. And as a freelance reporter, Hastings would be considered a bigger risk to be given unfettered access, compared with a beat reporter, who would not risk burning bridges by publishing many of McChrystal's remarks.

"Now this seemed to several observers -- and I was one -- a reveal. Think about what the Politico is saying: an experienced beat reporter is less of a risk for a powerful figure like McChrystal because an experienced beat reporter would probably not want to 'burn bridges' with key sources by telling the world what happens when those sources let their guard down. . .

"And then, the next day... the reveal disappears. The Politico erased it, as if the thing had never happened. Down the memory hole, like in Orwell's 1984."

This is frustratingly true; I saw it all the time when I was a reporter, and yes, the temptation to soften stories is real. After all, most public figures are interesting, charismatic people and mostly, they're fun to be around.

But your loyalty has to be to your readers. I'm sorry to say, I was in a distinct minority. That's why politicians were always shocked when I had the audacity to actually report what they said. I was supposed to know what to censor.

"I thought we were friends!" one local official said to me.

I looked at him. "I stood there and asked you a question. You responded, and you watched me write down your answer. What did you think was going to happen?" I said.

That's why I'm a big believer in rotating beats. You just don't want reporters getting too familiar with their sources - and it doesn't serve the public interest. If that still exists, I mean.

Promoting his latest film earlier this year, Michael Moore ignored the achievements of the Progressive movement and the New Deal when he declared, "capitalism is evil and you can't regulate evil." Now on the eve of President Obama's address to the nation on his Afghanistan strategy, Moore is rewriting the history of the campaign that put Obama in the Oval Office.

In an open letter to President Obama, Moore on Monday seems to have forgotten candidate Obama's aggressive stance towards Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan:

Do you really want to be the new "war president"? If you go to West Point tomorrow night (Tuesday, 8pm) and announce that you are increasing, rather than withdrawing, the troops in Afghanistan, you are the new war president. Pure and simple. And with that you will do the worst possible thing you could do -- destroy the hopes and dreams so many millions have placed in you. With just one speech tomorrow night you will turn a multitude of young people who were the backbone of your campaign into disillusioned cynics. You will teach them what they've always heard is true -- that all politicians are alike. I simply can't believe you're about to do what they say you are going to do. Please say it isn't so.

But at almost every turn in the 2008 campaign (for example, starting at about the 17:30 mark in the video above), it was Barack Obama who pledged to "finish the fight in Afghanistan."

In August 2007, as you'll recall, Senator Obama received a hellstorm of criticism for his statements regarding attacking Al Qaeda bases in Pakistan. As part of a broad - and forceful - foreign policy speech on August 1, Obama rightly took the Bush administration to task for the failure of its "no safe havens" doctrine in Pakistan. Regarding the Al Qaeda sanctuary safely nestled along the Afghan border, Obama declared:

"If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will."

And while Republican presidential candidate John McCain in February 2008 blasted Obama's advocacy of unilateral American attacks against Al Qaeda targets in Pakistan, by the beginning of last year the Bush administration itself was already carrying them out.

From almost the inception of his campaign, Obama argued that the diversion of U.S. military assets from Afghanistan to Iraq meant that "the people who were responsible for murdering 3,000 Americans on 9/11 have not been brought to justice." In a June speech, Obama highlighted McCain's denial of this inescapable point:

"We had al Qaeda and the Taliban on the run back in 2002. But then we diverted military, intelligence, financial, and diplomatic resources to Iraq. And yet Senator McCain has said as recently as this April that, 'Afghanistan is not in trouble because of our diversion to Iraq.' I think that just shows a dangerous misjudgment of the facts, and a stubborn determination to ignore the need to finish the fight in Afghanistan."

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Seemingly with each passing day, General Stanley McChrystal grows in the esteem of President Obama's conservative foes. After having savaged General Eric Shinseki for his pre-Iraq war testimony that the occupation would require "several hundreds of thousands" of American troops, Republicans have seized on McChrystal's public demands for more forces in Afghanistan as their latest battering ram to bludgeon Obama on national security. And as it turns out, McChrystal's inadvertent leak earlier this month regarding a classified CIA analysis puts him in the same company as Republicans John Boehner, Pete Hoekstra, Pat Roberts and, of course, Dick Cheney.

McChrystal in his leaked report and unprecedented public speech in London has put tremendous pressure on President Obama to quadruple the Bush-era commitment to the Afghan conflict. General McChrystal didn't merely announce that short of deploying as many as 60,000 more troops, the U.S. effort in Afghanistan "will likely result in failure." He also set out to demolish straw man alternatives to his escalated counterinsurgency plan, including:

"A paper has been written that recommends that we use a plan called 'Chaosistan', and that we let Afghanistan become a Somalia-like haven of chaos that we simply manage from outside."

But as Newsweek reported, that "paper" to which General McChrystal casually referred is almost surely a classified CIA assessment:

Two U.S. intelligence officials, who asked for anonymity when discussing a sensitive matter, say that the reference almost certainly comes from a recently published, and secret, CIA analysis titled "Chaosistan" (not "Chaostan"). Prepared by a "red team" of CIA analysts, the document, says one official, picks apart conventional analyses of the war and explains how forces inside Afghanistan--from hostile ethnic groups to intrusive neighbors to societal damage caused by past Taliban rule--work against the notions of a central Afghan government. The paper is not quite the policy proposal McChrystal implied it was, say the officials, since intelligence analysts don't generally recommend policy options.

Of course, the same Republican voices which lauded the leak of McChrystal's report and his UK grandstanding will doubtless remain silent now. Because while many in the GOP called for the prosecution of those behind the publication of the NSA domestic surveillance story, they themselves selectively leaked classified national security information for partisan political purposes.

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