Mid-August 2005 may be remembered as a moment in U.S. history when the president could no longer get away with the media trick of solemnly patting death on its head.

Unreality is a hallmark of media coverage for war. Yet -- most of all -- war is about death and suffering. War makers thrive on abstractions. Their media successes depend on evasion.

President Bush has tried to keep the loved ones of America’s war dead at middle distance, bathed in soft fuzzy light: close enough to exploit for media purposes, distant enough to insulate the commander in chief’s persona from the intrusion of wartime mourning in America.

What’s going on this week, outside the perimeter of the ranch-style White House in Crawford, is some reclamation of reality in public life. Cindy Sheehan has disrupted the media-scripted shadow play of falsity. And some other relatives of the ultimately sacrificed have been en route to the vigil in the dry hot Texas ditches now being subjected to enormous media attention a few miles from the vacationing president’s accommodations.

At this point, Bush’s spinners are desperate to divert the media

You've got to hand it to President Bush. Just when you'd think our ideologically-divided country couldn't possibly be further polarized, the president this week weighed in with his opinion on teaching American schoolchildren the alternative to evolution referred to with a straight face as "intelligent design" by its Christian fundamentalist proponents.

While conceding that curriculum decisions should be made by local school districts and not the federal government, Bush told Texas newspaper reporters in a group interview at the White House on Monday that he believes that "intelligent design" should be taught alongside evolution in American schools as competing theories.

"Both sides ought to be properly taught...so people can understand what the debate is about," he said. "Part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought. You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, and the answer is yes."

Scandal-plagued Halliburton -- the oil services company once headed by Vice President Cheney -- sold an Iranian oil development company key components for a nuclear reactor, say Halliburton sources with intimate knowledge into both companies’ business dealings.

Halliburton was secretly working at the time with one of Iran’s top nuclear program officials on natural gas related projects and sold the components in April to the official's oil development company, the sources said.

Just last week, a National Security Council report said Iran was a decade away from acquiring a nuclear bomb. That time frame could arguably have been significantly longer if Halliburton, whose miltary unit just reported a 284 percent increase in its second quarter profits due to its Iraq reconstruction contracts, was not actively providing the Iranian government with the means to build a nuclear weapon.

A lot of people want to believe that the current war on Iraq is some kind of aberration -- a radical departure from the previous baseline of U.S. foreign policy. That’s a comforting illusion.

Yes, the current administration in Washington is notable for the extreme mendacity and calculated idiocy of its claims. But -- decade after decade -- the propaganda fuel for one U.S. war after another has flowed from a standard set of lies.

Some of the boilerplate lies are implicit assumptions about Uncle Sam’s benign and even noble intent. Other deceptions rely on more specific whoppers, endlessly whirling through the news media’s spin cycle. From one war to the next, certain themes are played up more than others -- but the process always involves building an agenda to start a war, trying to justify the war while it’s underway, and then claiming that the war must continue as long as the man in the Oval Office says so.

Sometimes a war begins suddenly, filling the national horizon with a huge insistent flash. At other times, over a period of months or years, a low distant rumble gradually turns into a roar. But in any event, the

Norman Solomon's new book, "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death," opens with a disturbing prologue.  The U.S. media has refused to give serious coverage to the Downing Street Memos on the grounds that they are "old news."  In the initial pages of his book, and supplemented by the rest, Solomon makes a case that both outdoes and undoes that claim.