I'd been planning on blogging about the copyright dispute over Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land," but Dan Gillmor beat me to it. Guthrie, by the way, didn't mean the song as praise for America; he wrote it as a protest while people were starving during the Depression. Here's the fourth verse:

Was a high wall there that tried to stop me
A sign was painted said: Private Property,
But on the back side it didn't say nothing --
God blessed America for me.

One bright sunny morning in the shadow of the steeple
By the Relief Office I saw my people --
As they stood hungry, I stood there wondering if
God blessed America for me.

-30-

Checking in on Al-Jazeera, err, Fox News, and landed just in time to see Bill O'Reilly in a mini-debate with Michael Moore. After a fairly lackluster exchange, Mr. Moore went on his way and Mr. O'Reilly called it a classic case of different world views and blind idealogy -- that no matter how much evidence was presented to Moore, his blind idealogy won't let him change.

Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.

Not to bash Mr. O'Reilly -- nothing fresh in that -- but the conversation with Moore nutshelled a key point in this fall's election.

If President Bush wasn't telling the truth about the Iraq war, was he lying or was he mistaken?

To O'Reilly and others of his ilk, Bush was merely acting on bad information. As evidence, the right wing loves to tout alleged confirmation from British intelligence, French intelligence, Russian intelligence, and of course, that great bogeyman of old, Bill Clinton.

Forget for a moment that the Russian warning has zero credibility -- the State Department had no knowledge of the warning and saw it as Vladmir Putin, an ex-spy speaking well after the fact, trying to help his buddy. Forget for a moment that Fox News will bash anything French, unless, of course, it serves their purprose. Forget for a moment that Clinton could cure cancer and deliver world peace and Fox News would still say he did it for selfish, immoral reasons.

But I digress.

Aside from the semantics and the Philosophy 101 sort of question (is the absence of truth priima facie evidence of a lie) here's where O'Reilly's argument totally falls apart.

When someone is involved in a mistake, they stop what they were doing as soon as the mistake is realized. Otherwise, it's intentional.

Therefore, it is quite hollow for O'Reilly to defend the Bush Administration for making an honest mistake in going to war in Iraq when Vice President Dick Cheney and his fellow travelers stick to the same sound bites about Iraq being connected to 911 when it most certainly was not.

It is indisputable that the rationale for the war has changed repeatedly -- to eliminate an imminent threat (uh, woops), to eliminate a brutal dictator (one of 30 or so currently on the planet), to bring democracy to the Middle East (so the Iraqis can impose martial law and hold a free election to vote to become Iran). The best spin now is that Iraq is the central front in the global war on terror. Nevermind the fact that there are more terrorists in Iraq today than under Husseiin; it's easiier for the jihadists to attack American interests there than here.

The biggest single lie, however, perpetrated daily by Fox News is the idea that America is at war with a power, as Cheney puts it, on par with the Axis in World War II. Memo to thinking people everywhere -- the Bushies make the Nazi comparisons because it bolsters their idea of preemptive war being morally justifiable. The war in Iraq is not an abstract concept; it's a concrete mistake -- the wrong war against the wrong enemy at the wrong time.

There is a difference between being attacked and being at war, and that difference has been lost in the time since 911. Bush wants to consider himself a war president because then his suupporters can question the patriotism of people like me.

So what makes this alleged war different than wars in the recent past? Well, there's no draft. There's no tax increase or war bonds to pay for it. There is no rationing, no sacrifice by the citizenry. There's this spin that America can be attacked at anytime, yet the borders are as porous as there ever was. Mr. Bush can't have it both ways.

The best single example of this fake war is the Congressional reaction to the recommendations of the 911 Commission. America is at war, America is at peril, an attack is imminent, and Congress knew exactly what it had to do.

Go on vacation.

-30-

Here's something newsy about the newsless Democratic National Convention.

Blogs are not news.

Reporters writing about the media is not news (back when I was a reporter, we called it "thumbsucking") and this oft-reported idea that amateur-hour journalism is somehow filling a niche missed by mainstream media is just ridiculous.

It is not news that the Democrats credentialed bloggers. Hell, half the delegations are running their own blogs, thanks to lessons learned from Howard Dean. And here's a challenge; go to the blog at www.vademocrats.org and try to find a list of the convention delegates. Go ahead. I dare you.

Remember, blogs are organized in reverse chronological order, and finding anything in a blog is directly related to your persistence in plowing through the entire thing.

It is no accident that blogs have grown in popularity, considering how damn few people understand what it takes to organize a Web site nowadays. Just run a blog and don't even try; if somebody actually needs to find something, let 'em go to Google.

Case in point. Just a few years ago, when working on Web site organization (called information architecture in the trade) projects, I used to use www.vbgov.com as a shining example. Nowadays, it's a total mess (go to that site and try to find information on community service options for a juvenile; go ahead, I dare you). This is a particularly sore point with me; a little over a year ago, I applied for a job on that site and didn't get so much as a whiff. Few people understand what it takes to organize information, be it visually or logically. Hell, most people don't even stop to think about how products are organized on a grocery shelf.

But I digress.

As I type this, CNN just sent a reporter up to the cheap seats (they actually called it the blogosphere) to gauge what the bloggers are tap-tap-tapping at this hour. Might the resources of the world's most recognized news brand be better utilized by, say, demanding a substantive answer on an issue or two?

To my mind, there's one major difference between this convention and the Democrats gathering in 2000, and it's the treatment of one William Jefferson Clinton. In 2000, Dems felt they had to distance themselves from the scandal-plagued standard bearer. Nowadays, Mr. Clinton has gotten all his Elvis back.

I guess it took a president lying about a war to put into perspective a president lying about a blow job.

-30-

Mr. Marshall saw an ad for chimney sweeps in Sunday's Norfolk Virginian-Pilot -- no experience necessary! -- and seriously thought about applying for the job. Aside from looking good in a top hat and tails, Mr. Marshall is getting tired of trying to make a living in a field based in large part on the hardest thing there is in the world -- getting people to change.