Earnest, sad, and righteous, they are not. More inspired by M*A*S*H or Dr. Strangelove than The Deer Hunter or Coming Home, a new pack of political films that defy the clichés of the post-9/11 Iraq War cinema has arrived. Rife with satire and absurdity, with more ambiguity and less agit-prop, they don't toe the MoveOn party line and go beyond the familiar war-is-hell mantra. As documentary filmmaker Michael Tucker says: "Yes, it's tragic and horrible. Duh. What else is there?"

For one, there's the bizarre madness of it at all, as shown in Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. While ostensibly a raunchy teen comedy, the film's archvillain is a racist, ignorant deputy chief of Homeland Security who sends Harold and Kumar to face the horrors of Gitmo. "While it's obviously absurd," co-writer-director Hayden Schlossberg acknowledges of the film's premise, "there's an element of truth. There have been people thrown in Guantánamo who have done nothing. We like the idea of doing something about these subjects in a way that's not serious."

"Sincerity handicaps you," explains Tucker, who co-directed a number of Iraq docs, including Gunner Palace. "Trying to be earnest about something—it does nothing to explain it," he says. "That's why the fiction films have largely failed—because people are already in that emotional place." 

This GAO report may be the most damning condemnation of the Bush administration's counter-terrorism efforts. The report goes on to say that the Bush administration has failed to develop any plan to address the Al Qaeda threat. Worse, the report finds that Al-Qaeda is now able to attack the United States and represents the "most serious" threat to this country.

The report's opinion of the Bush administration efforts speaks for itself. Not only have we not met our goals but we have no plan to meet our goals. Al-Qaeda can now attack the United States. Al Qaeda in Pakistan is the most serious threat. Al-Qaeda is using the Pakistan tribal areas to put the finishing touches on its plans to attack the United States.

It is really not a good thing to have incompetent people running this country. 

What's excessive is the idea that we have to steel the national will to respond to an evil of such magnitude. No, we need to keep looking for them and stopping them. Otherwise, if their perverse ambitions to heroism are based on the idea that they are the vanguard of the clash of civilizations, why should we gratify their ambitions? Think of it this way, what if those who frequent the chat rooms found their cause disappearing from the headlines? What if they couldn't find themselves when they try to vanity google? What if they faded from being such a big part of our consciousness? Who would that really hurt -- us, or them?

The military was scrambling Monday to put together defense teams for the six Guantánamo captives singled out by a Pentagon prosecutor for death-penalty eligible charges alleging they conspired to kill thousands in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

"I will move as quickly as I can, but we will take our time and we will not be bullied by the government," said Army Col. Steve David, Chief Defense Counsel in the Office of Military Commissions. David, an Indiana state judge who was mobilized to the job, said at a bare minimum he needed six lawyers, six paralegals and six independent investigators with top security clearances to work on the trials.

As of Monday morning, he said, he had a sum total of seven military lawyers assigned to his office.

We have now the Attorney General of the United States telling Congress that it's not against the law for the President to violate the law if his own Department of Justice says it's not.

It is as brazen a defense of the unitary executive as anything put forward by the Administration in the last seven years, and it comes from an attorney general who was supposed to be not just a more professional, but a more moderate, version of Alberto Gonzales

President Bush has now laid down his most aggressive challenge to the very constitutional authority of Congress. It is a naked assertion of executive power. The founders would have called it tyrannical. His cards are now all on the table. This is no bluff.