America/Conor O'Clery: One of the first things Paul Wolfowitz did after being nominated by President Bush as president of the World Bank was to consult a higher authority on poverty and development issues.
He telephoned U2 lead singer Bono.
The deputy defence secretary twice talked to the Dubliner at some length on Thursday. An adviser to Wolfowitz said Bono's name had apparently also figured on a shortlist for the World Bank post. He is held in extraordinarily high regard in the Bush administration for his fight against Aids and poverty. Mr Bush called Bono "a good man" during his talk with the Taoiseach in the White House on Wednesday.
The telephone discussions between Wolfowitz and Bono went well, and the two men just "clicked", the spokesman said. They talked about "reducing poverty, about development, about the opportunity to help people that the World Bank presidency provides and about charitable giving and social progress around the globe".
A spokesman for Data (Debt, Aids, Trade and Africa), the lobby group co-founded by Bono, said the U2 star believed it was important to tell Wolfowitz about the issues that are critical to the World Bank "like debt cancellation, aid effectiveness and a real focus on poverty reduction".
Wolfowitz would undoubtedly welcome an endorsement from Bono, as it would go a long way to defuse criticism of Bush's decision. His nomination to succeed outgoing World Bank chief James Wolfensohn is hugely controversial in Europe and among critics in the US of Wolfowitz's hawkish role as an architect of the Iraq war.
But conservatives have reacted with delight to the nomination. Greenpeace said it was a disaster to give the job to a man "who will put US and oil interests first", and in London former development secretary Clare Short said the message was that "America is going to do what it likes, or hard cheese."
Moises Naim, editor of Foreign Policy magazine and a former World Bank board member, said the nomination would turn the World Bank into the American Bank. Adding to the controversy, the Washington Post reported yesterday that Wolfowitz, who is divorced, has a romantic relationship with Shaha Riza, a communications adviser in the institution.
Last year a "reporter" called Karen Ryan featured in reports shown on 40 television stations around the US about the benefits of Bush's new Medicare drug scheme. The reports were incredibly upbeat. There wasn't anything about the expense of the Medicare bill or the benefits to the pharmaceutical industry.
No wonder. They were "happy news", faked by the Bush administration.
Karen Ryan was not a reporter but an actress pretending to be one. According to New York Times reporters David Barstow and Robin Stein, more than 20 federal agencies including the State and Defence Departments create fake news clips for distribution to the networks.
The practice started with the Clinton administration, but spending on fake news doubled, to $250 million, in the last four years. Only sophisticated viewers would realise that the clips, which contain pretend interviews and trumpet government "successes" are actually government propaganda as blatant as the harvest reports on Soviet television.
Television stations have been complicit in the deception as they often use the government-supplied videos to skimp on real news coverage. One Fox affiliate in Memphis even used a station reporter to read the text accompanying a State Department fake news item.
On Wednesday the president was none too pleased when a reporter reminded him that he had promised to end another administration news wheeze, that of getting columnists to promote government programmes while being paid on the quiet.
He joked that the PR clips could carry a message: "I'm George W. Bush and I approved this disclaimer." He also insisted there was no breach of the law if the clips are purely informational and that, anyway, local stations can reveal the origin of the videos if they choose.
This flies in the face of the finding by the Government Accountability Office that the fake news was impermissible "covert propaganda". It warned that they must be accompanied by disclosure of their origin.
The administration is instructing its official to ignore the order which, as the Washington Post pointed out, means that the difference between the government and Jon Stewart's Daily Show is that Stewart wants people to know his news is phoney.
Someone in the administration apparently went one step beyond fake news and gave a reporter a fake document which, if taken at face value, would have destroyed the reputation of a noted journalist and commentator.
The document, purportedly a classified cable from the Defence Intelligence Agency, accused William Arkin, a military analyst for NBC, of working as a spy for Saddam Hussein. It "revealed" that a ledger found in Baghdad showed a monthly stipend paid to Arkin for the period 1994-1998 to report on UN Special Commission activities. The document was sent to a reporter on the Washington Times who called Arkin and sent him a copy.
The Pentagon acknowledged that the document was a forgery, and Arkin has written to Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld expressing his concern that someone familiar with classified reporting had forged the document and given it to the press in the hope that it would be reported as genuine.
"There were a lot of reasons why people would want to do me harm," Arkin told the Washington Post. One was the recent publication of his book Code Names: Deciphering US Military Plans, Programs and Operations in the 9/11 World. One giveaway in the military jargon that littered the document. It referred to "canular procedures". Canular is the French word for hoax.
George Bush told a joke recently in Montana designed to appeal to a local audience. It involved a city dweller asking directions in rural America and being told to look for two cattle guards - which everyone in Montana knows are metal grates designed to keep cows from straying.
The hapless city slicker asks: "What colour of uniform do the cattle guards wear?"
It seems Bush has a long memory. The joke was used against him by a political opponent back in 1978 when he was running for the Texas Congress, and he was regarded as a blow-in from Connecticut.