Mr. Timothy Noah posed a good question in Slate the other day. Why this lie?

It was known for months even to people like me, who don?t have anything to do with politics, that the British and US governments had exaggerated the WMD threat posed by Iraq in order to gain public support for war. Most people (including me) did not feel badly about it since we all agreed that Saddam was a thug and deserves to the thrown to the dustbin of history. But even those who did not think that the war was right, did not feel they could question the underlying ussumptions of war because a. the war was a popular idea b. The president had stratospheric ?ratings? and c. they could not prove that the WMD allegations were wrong.

But now that the body bags are trickling back home and sheer deprivation that the Iraqis are going through is evident to at least the media savvy, the atmosphere is slightly different. People can also afford to be more critical now because of the following chain of events:

-The fact that Joseph Wilson IV decided to open his mouth, gave an opening to the sceptics.

- The situation in Iraq has emboldened the press to follow through. Through the almost daily coverage by David Sanger of New York Times and Walter Pincus & Dana Milbank of Washington Post (who Bush snubbed in a press conference a few months back), political America is slowly reconstructing what happened behind the curtains.

- The uncharacteristic fumbling of White House compounded this. It became blatantly evident even to last day of Ari Fleisher in White House that there is serious bullshitting going on (Both TPM and Milbank had fun with it). A friend of mine from college once told me that if you wanna lie, you really gotta stick to your script. You can?t keep changing it. It is the rapid changing story line that caught every one?s attention.

-Lastly, it matters that the administration has completely pissed off the spooks. CIA leaked like there is no tomorrow. It really depends on the contrite one and his gang how long does the story last.

Meanwhile, it is feeling more and more like a John le Caree novel.. There seems to a war on against Wilson who set the ball rolling. If this story is correct, then the vendetta has already killed his wife?s career. In a rather hilarious turn of events, the ABC news reporter who reported the troop?s disaffection on TV was outed as not only gay, but also Canadian in Drudge report, apparently at the instigation of White House officials! (I don?t think any army will like to see its troops to vent in front of television cameras, but killing the messenger seems rather crude even for this administration.)

Across the ocean, Dr. David Kelly, one of the sources for Andrew Gillian?s story on BBC seem to have committed suicide after his grilling in parliament. The ministry of defense there fed him to wolves was hoping to provoke BBC into revealing their source. I felt sick as I read this. No one, neither the British government, nor the BBC comes out smelling of roses.

In Capital Influx Elizabeth Spiers quoted a funny,

"You know, I'm really disappointed in our military. I can't believe we haven't managed to plant weapons of mass destruction in Iraq yet. We were so good about planting shit [weapons caches, drugs] in Latin America in the 70s... I think I've lost my faith in the military industrial complex."

Update: Excellent backgrounder on why this is important in TPM.

Check out this David Thomson interview. Thomson is one of the most erudite and readable people out there on the subject of films. He wrote the 'New Biographical dictionary of films; a book I plan to read.

Guardian has a story on online fiction. The best thing is the links at the end of the article. There is another Guardian story called Envy extracted from the current issue of Granta that is quite well written. I feel some things are best left unsaid and feel a little ambivalent about this story.

Jessa of Blooksluts, from where we love to steal links, has finally written about her addiction.

There was an opinion poll on Best female novelists in Bretain sometime back that BBC reported. Four of Jane Austen's books make it to the top 10. BBC also says that Gurindher Chadha (the director of 'Bhaji on the beach' and 'Bend it like Beckham') is busy making a musical loosely based on a Jane Austen novel. The Jane Austen adaptation that I absolutely adored was Sense and Sensibility. The script was written by Emma Thompson and the movie was directed by Ang Lee. (There was great story on The New Yorker on Ang Lee a few weeks back that included hilarious anecdotes about the making of Sense and Sensibility).

I read Alexandra Fuller's memoir of her African childhood, 'Don't let's go to the dogs tonight'. Check out the book if you get a chance. There is a Random House interview with the author is here. Guardian also has extensive reviews and excerpts from the book.

Guardian, incidentally, is coming to America. Michael Wolff has the scoop.

I also finished reading Evenlyn Waugh's Decline and Fall which was great, dante Club which was good and ....yes J K Rowling's new Harry Potter book which I finished over a weekend (No jokes allowed!).

After having spent yesterday happily slandering China, I wish I could simply extrapolate that argument to their high tech industry. Unfortunately, that doesn?t work.

China today is an economic juggernaut. Unless India invests heavily in infrastructure, very soon they would be playing catch up with Indian services sector including the software industry. And the march that they are stealing on services has nothing to do with cheap labor. The top universities in China are producing first rate engineers pretty much on an assembly line. When you combine that with Chinese work ethic and infrastructural superiority, the only thing that is holding them back is their trouble with the English language. And That is not exactly an insurmountable barrier.

Peter Mcdermott, traveller and programmer, maintains an interesting weblog from Beijing where he works in the IT sector. It gives you a good flavour of the techy life out there.

There is a good story in BusinessWeek about why Indian software companies feel comfortable that they won?t be challenged by China soon. I think it is foolish.

I am too burnt out at the end of the day to write another treatise about China. We'll keep that for the time the Chinese premier makes the return visit to India!