Old-school journo Pete Hamill and Bill Kristol got together for a little argument, filmed by IFC's new Gideon Yago-hosted thing The IFC Media Project. As Bill Kristol is a sad joke and Pete Hamill is a legend, it was not really a fair fight. The topic, thankfully, allowed Bill to shill for his miserable lost war instead of having to defend Sarah Palin again. Hamill still schooled him. Kristol doesn't really think Americans need to see the "blood" and "coffins" that war creates, that way we can all feel much better about ourselves.

Happy (in a somber way) Veteran's Day. If you're a young American aged 17-24, you might consider honoring the sacrifices of our men and women in uniform by joining the United States Army yourself! Sounds good, no? We all know the Army has been having some recruitment problems lately, what with the hopeless wars we're fighting and the psycho Commander in Chief and the excellent chance of being blown up. But the Army has decided to shift its sales pitch in order to lure you youngsters in. By talking more about Iraq!: They're adding a webcast called "Straight from Iraq" to their website, where soldiers will tell you the real deal about life in the desert war zone. Presumably not too real, though. They're also supercharging their marketing plan with the following changes: - More internet, less "sponsorships of professional rodeos." - The voice of Gary Sinise! - New commercial: "young workers in business attire suddenly start climbing walls. 'This company is filled with dreamers,' Mr. Sinise says." You'll have to join the Army to know how it ends! Of course, all of this is very much deck chair/ Titanic. If more people join the Army it will be because they can't get a job anywhere else since our economy collapsed. And if the Army was smart it would have one simple selling point: "Bush is gone." [NYT]

If John McCain and his campaign want to play the guilt by association card, the Dems just might have them beat. Sure, Barack Obama palled around with terrorists, but McCain is hiring Saddam Hussein's cronies! It's true! Investigative reporter Murray Waas reports that the guy hired to lead McCain's presidential transition team (what a wonderful job! huge salary and you don't have to do anything) is a lobbyist who once helped lobby for the Iraqi dictator back in the 1990s. It is a long and complicated story but the gist is that McCain's guy worked with two other lobbyists who later pleaded guilty to acting as unregistered agents of Hussein's government and Timmons pretended he didn't know what they were doing but he totally did. So therefore McCain gassed his own people and we need to invade him ASAP. [HuffPo]

Twitter cofounder Biz Stone posted a chart showing the frequency of political keywords during Friday night's McCain/Obama debate. "Iraq" hit the highest rate of tweeting at a given moment during the event, followed by "tax" and then "Korean" after John McCain deemed North Korea "a huge gulag" that stunts its citizens' growth by three inches. But the trick to reading a chart like this is to look not at the height of the lines, but the surface area under them — that's how you measure the total number of tweets for that keyword. Iraq and taxes look to be the biggest. But Stone's chart shows Iran and Russia, not Koreans, are what everyone's tweeting about.

Just this morning, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice was talking to the Associated Press in New York about the frustrating ongoing negotiations with Iraq regarding the governance of U.S. soldiers deployed there. How to top that off? From a reader: "Condi Rice is getting her nails done RIGHT NOW at Lovely Tender nails on w 72nd street between columbus and amsterdam." Do not approach! Secret Service will frag your ass! Update! Commenter Clarence Rosario sends photographic evidence (after the jump), and notes, "We boo'd her pretty soundly."

Vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin has reason to be proud of her son Track, 19 of whom she spoke at length at the Republican National Convention. Track will be deployed to Iraq on Sept. 11, Palin informed the crowd (and the press) last night, while her nephew Casey is already serving on an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf. But Palin mentioned her family's military service by way of explaining her strong support for her running mate John McCain, and in so doing broke sharply with the presidential candidate and veteran's own, much-acclaimed policy on refusing to discuss, and thus benefit from, his own son's military service in Iraq. She also opened herself up to more discussion of her unwed daughter's pregnancy, heretofore characterized as off-limits because it involved Palin's children.

"What is kidult?" asks an impatient thirtysomething Hong Kong entrepreneur delivering a PowerPoint presentation in the most memorable story in this month's Harper's. Wong is bald, disheveled and — he confesses without shame to his audience of harried retail buyers — hungover. But he is happy! In a decidedly mercenary, mirthless industry (toys: the margins are crap and there's all those lead problems, you know) Wong has made millions on a business idea that can be essentially summarized as the invention of the Happy Meal of "kidults," whereby Wong's limited-edition action figures are packaged with six-packs of San Miguel beer. "I like video games, toys, model, comics book, everything. This is kidult," Wong says, allowing that he has the body of a 35-year-old and the mind of a 5-year-old. To "mix the imagination world and the real world-this is kidult." Wong is a curiously apt symbol of Harper's itself, a magazine at once repulsed/captivated/existentially amused by its own brand of kidulthood. Hey, maybe they should start packaging the magazine with beer! (Or Klonopin?)The obsession with the infantilization of everything that runs through the toy trade fair story - it is ostensibly on DEADLY TOYS! but it is really about how capitalism sucks duh — seems to permeate both the magazine's "real world" of journalism and its "imagination world" of fiction, the latter of which is okay maybe not "embodied by" but for my purposes represented here with last month's opening reading, a short story by Ben Marcus titled On Not Growing Up. And so although I once bought in to a jaded ex-staffer's characterization of the magazine as a "crusty old man" it would actually seem to be Harper's' intimacy with its inner teenage boy that differentiates it from the legion other stapled staples of highbrow required reading. The September issue, by way of example, features: 1. A description of a humping dog toy on display at the aforementioned toy fair whose packaging reads "I hump until disconnected." 2. A retired colonel leading a newly-established cultural-sensitivity hearts/minds unit called the "human terrain team" jokingly imagines an appropriate insignia for his unit to be "a skeleton surfing on a wave of human bodies…all the bodies of all the people that the United States Army has ever subjugated throughout history." ("No, no," the psychological operations (psyop) sergeant cuts in. "A skeleton sitting on a throne of skulls.") 3. Some excerpts from the board game "Vatican." (It is like the "Life" of the Holy See.) "The Holy Spirit intervenes in our favor by appearing to cardinals who had been wavering in their support of you. Earn forty cardinal votes." Hee hee, I love it when the Holy Spirit appears and advises me to, say, write… 4. Retarded-brilliant punny headlines i.e. "Paper Pushkin" and, atop a transcript of the torture-y interrogation of a sixteen-year-old accused of killing a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan, the title "Teen Beat." ** 5. A cover story on Kaplan's burgeoning "No Child Left Behind" business teaching test prep classes wherein an English teacher relates to the author, while they are eating lunch in a nursing home, that he sometimes writes fetish erotica about old people — and also "soft-cock fucking" — to make extra money.* 6. A whole passage on scientific sex studies that determine, among other things, that "men who are narcissistic thrill-seekers also have more sex." Also: "Computers are now better than people at air hockey." I could go on, but I don't actually want to tarnish the platinum prose that sets off these semi-precious little gems!*** The larger point is, Harper's kidulthood is the very thing that is so lovable about it. Part of this is merely a matter of salvaging some of the weirder details other editors would cut "for space."**** There are readers who might find some of that sort of detail gratuitous: reviews of Thomas Frank's book The Wrecking Crew, an excerpt of which***** was last month's Harper's cover story, roundly mocked Frank's fond little asides about his favorite DC hardcore bands such as Government Issue. To such readers I can only say: Fuck you. Because in all seriousness, all this beautiful puerile crap is generally the deliberate result of the magazine's mission to apply a kidlike curiosity to its subjects, more often than not by favoring over the opportunistic time peg or the imperative to Definitively Weigh In On Whatever a degree of participation to every topic it covers, to the point that it's sometimes hard to see why exactly they chose this moment in time to send that guy — and it is usually a guy, unless it is Barbara Ehrenreich — to do that weird thing. Why follow the trail of rubber ducks stranded by a container ship that capsized in the South China sea in 1992? Why hang out with Stevie Wonder at the Super Bowl when the bizarre dispatch won't hit newsstands until the following summer? Why start an inane trend called "flashmobbing" when…hey wait! As it turns out, maybe that's actually the wrong question. Maybe because a good story, to take this back to the opening anecdote, is a little like a toy robot:

Dexter Filkins spent four years covering the Iraq War for the New York Times. Today, the paper's magazine has an excerpt of his upcoming book, The Forever War. Filkins is a beautiful writer, which only serves to enhance the enormous sadness of his story. The piece pulses not with political outrage, but with weariness over a steady diet of death. After the jump, one small excerpt: Filkins tells how his desire for a photo of a dead insurgent ended with a Marine shot and killed:

The US Army has freed Ahmed Nouri Raziak, a cameraman for the AP, who had been held without charges for the past three months. Not to be confused with AP photographer Bilal Hussein, recently released after two years in US custody. [Reuters]

In perfect sync with some apparently genuine positive news out of Iraq, Judith Miller is yet again delivering spoonfed reports on America's glorious strategy there, just as she did before she was disgraced at the Times. It seems we are finally being greeted as liberators — within the massive prison camps we have constructed. Miller, now employed by the neocons at the Manhattan Institute, reports in Reader's Digest that Iraq's "Camp Bucca" has been transformed from a riot zone into a super-empowering bakery, gym and mini-University, except for the 20 percent of prisoners sent to some sort of inner prison too terrifying to detail:

Barack Obama's advance staff confused everyone when they told journalists not to wear green during their trip to the Middle East. Obama's staff claimed green is the color of Hamas, which is actually isn't really. Though it is the color of Islam in general. So Obama is distancing himself from all the Muslims in the world, which should help dispel those rumors about him being a fist-bumping terrorist by seeming like he's trying way, way too hard, almost like a man with something to hide. Or maybe some staffer just did a shit job of research and thought that was a helpful and clever suggestion. Journos are also prohibited from wearing nail polish and tank tops and from actually asking the candidate any questions, as Andrea Mitchell bitches about in this attached Hardball clip. Chris Matthews is so thrilled that Barack Obama can shoot a basket (he is also shocked that there are so many black people in the military!), but Mitchell seems to think pretend interviews organized by the military are maybe a bad thing? She's not wearing green, though. Don't you hate how biased everyone is?

So is the media blitz accompanying Barack Obama to Iraq actually evidence of that nasty pro-Obama bias we keep hearing about? Sure, whatever. WHO CARES. The media's been self-flagellating about everything for the past, like, six months, so all the pro-Obama bias is corrected by the Obama hype-debunking and "oh we are being unfair" handwringing that every cable news panel has to engage in. Half the coverage of the Obama trip has been of the "will this dispel the myth that he's a naive fool about foreign policy?" nature. Which is goofy because, hey, John McCain's foreign policy chops are not exactly respected by anyone. But he's old! Of course then Nouri al-Maliki (we actually can't believe ol' Nouri is still alive, good on him) accidentally endorsed Barack Obama's Iraq plan (the 'get the hell out of Iraq' plan). This is "a PR boost" for Obama. We're including this MSNBC clip covering the trip primarily because they break in halfway through to show "new video" of Obama in a room with some Iraqi officials like it is somehow enlightening.

No wonder Lara Logan was so cranky on The Daily Show—she's preggers! Logan, the CBS war correspondent whose well-deserved promotion to CBS' chief foreign affairs correspondent was overshadowed by all this homewrecking nonsense, is now safely in Washington and expecting a child with Joseph Burkett, the contractor she famously carried on an affair with while stationed in Baghdad. The scoop comes from Washington Post "media critic" Howard Kurtz, which is funny, because he is generally useless and was all hand-wringy about how tabloidy this story was last week. Funny how a little exclusive can change a guy's mind, right? More passionate wartime forbidden love, below.

This Onion parody of morning news product integration is a smirk-demanding indictment of a news media being hollowed by integrated advertising. What's really interesting, though, is that it's not just a really good parody of morning news or product integration. (Yeah, because we totally need another sketch lampooning product integration.) The surprise is that it's really good war criticism of a kind we haven't seen. Sure, Colbert and Stewart mock the war, but in abstract, verbal terms. It seems like the Pentagon ban on images of soldiers bodies returning to the States has seeped into the rest of the media. Video after the jump.

Five years into the war in Iraq, and I had no idea military guys aren't allowed to have any porn over there. That's perhaps because there don't seem to have been too many soldiers actually thrown out of the country over the stuff, probably because the armed services need every last person they can get. Six-figure private contractor gigs in Iraq, on the other hand, are still somewhat coveted, so ITT small-arms repairman Brian Sayler was pretty bummed to be ejected for possessing some DVDs he got free on a stateside break. A stripper, Cassidey (pictured), in Stoughton, Mass., patriotically donated a free lap dance to Sayler, along with a collection of free porn movies such as "Cassidey's Day Off." Both the military and its contractors have had a lax policy toward enforcing the porn ban, according to an article in Boston magazine, but for some reason Sayler's building in Iraq was searched and he was sent packing. He ended up winning reinstatement on appeal, but that's not the point: If porno freedom for brave troops abroad isn't Change We Can Believe In, then what is? [Boston]

Apparently some CBS execs saw their foreign correspondent Lara Logan on The Daily Show last week, and, like thousands of young men across the nation, they said, "who is that cutie?" It turned out she already worked for them! But because she insisted on reporting depressing news from depressing places like Afghanistan and Iraq, she never made it on-air. That will change! A CBS press release says Ms. Logan will now be "CBS News' Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent and will be based in Washington, D.C." Effective immediately! Now Ms. Logan can shoot herself in the head when she's forced to watch the news they show us here in the states. Oh, and also, did you know she is a HOMEWRECKER? Oh ho ho yes she is.

"Coverage of the war in Afghanistan has increased slightly this year, with 46 minutes of total coverage year-to-date compared with 83 minutes for all of 2007. NBC has spent 25 minutes covering Afghanistan, partly because the anchor Brian Williams visited the country earlier in the month. Through Wednesday, when an ABC correspondent was in the middle of a prolonged visit to the country, ABC had spent 13 minutes covering Afghanistan. CBS has spent eight minutes covering Afghanistan so far this year." That is from Brian Stelter's remarkable story in the New York Times which is actually entirely about Lara Logan's appearance on The Daily Show. So. No one cares about the war(s) anymore! Until a hot lady shames us in a sexy accent.

Rafid Ahmed Alwan (left), the Iraqi refugee code-named "Curveball" whose nonsense reports about Saddam Hussein's mobile bio weapons labs to German Intelligence officers helped pave the way for invasion, is speaking publicly for the first time. And he's pissed. "'For what I've done, I should be treated like a king,' he said outside a cramped, low-rent apartment he shares with his family [somewhere in Germany]. Instead, the Iraqi informant [...] has flipped burgers at McDonald's and Burger King, washed dishes in a Chinese restaurant and baked pretzels in an all-night bakery. He also has faced withering international scorn for peddling discredited intelligence that helped spur an invasion of his native country. Now, in his first public comments, the 41-year-old engineer from Baghdad complains that the CIA and other spy agencies are blaming him for their mistakes."

A new documentary opening this week called Operation Filmmaker explores the question: Why won't these ungrateful Iraqis be nice? The film centers on Muthana Mohmed, a young Iraqi man rescued from his war-torn country by stolid actor Liev Schreiber, who wants to help the kid break into the movie business. But despite the do-gooding of billions of watts worth of Hollywood stardom, Mohmed turns out to have some personal problems. Apparently he's a bit of jerk sometimes, which makes him like most young people, but also makes him an "essential study in intercultural communication and the ways it can go very wrong." The lesson: Hollywood liberals are to blame for Iraq's problems. Or something! Watch the trailer, after the jump: