Picture, if you will, the opening scenes of next year's blockbuster, The Quagmire—a dramatic account of America's descent into the war in Vietnam.

The film opens on young Lt. Lyndon Johnson of the U.S. army. He is stationed in Tokyo in the 1950's. As the opening credits roll, he is sulking away from the base’s fancy officers' club, his application for membership having been rejected. He realizes that try as he might, with his poor Texas upbringing, he will never be one of them. Stung, he ventures out into the field, across the Asian continent, turning over those stones that the well-to-do ne'er-do-wells back at the club couldn't be [...]

Daniel Henninger'sWall Street Journal op-ed column today is mind-boggling. He comes out hard, so it's easy to summarize: "It needs to be said. The rescue of the Chilean miners is a smashing victory for free-market capitalism." His point is that the drill and the drill rig used for the miner rescue were developed by two smallish companies, right here in America. Other bits of technology were also created by companies! The free market innovates! Companies make things! So capitalism saved miners. Pretty much everything about this column is utterly undone by the facts.

Yes. Talking headbot Charlie Gasparino really buys the chronic baloney line that the head of Goldman Sachs is concerned about retaining talent if the firm "can't" pay out bonuses because of public outcry. (I mean, "can't?) They don't give a rat's ass about public outcry! And they don't have any problem retaining talent! People are banging down the door to work there, as the company slowly reinflates after its bullshit, made-up layoff crusade of the last year. Where the fuck are people going to work-Lehmann Brothers? Every failed hedge fund in Greenwich? Gasparino presents three alleged "options" for dealing with bonuses, including raising salaries and shrinking bonuses (not going [...]

This from a 22-year-old senior vice president at Prudential Douglas Elliman, in New York City, regarding the residential sales market: "We are now seeing a definite turnaround as well as some major market activity and are eagerly anticipating a great 2009." Haha, LIAR! Yes: him again.

There is no way this is true. This year, says the New York Observer, Vanity Fair and Bloomberg News are actually co-hosting an afterparty for the White House Correspondent's Dinner. (In previous years, they've been "competing" parties. Which is to say, one was at an embassy, the other was at Chris Hitchen's not-so-big apartment.) According to Vanity Fair's publicist Beth Kseniak, "the entire guest list will be trimmed to just 200 people." Highly unlikely!

As anybody who has read a John le Carré novel knows, the spooks, many of whom work with or as diplomats, are in the habit of putting false information about in order to achieve this or that noble or nefarious end. Which raises a number of subtle questions regarding the recent WikiLeaks cable disclosures: how much of this stuff is exaggerated or untrue? Is it even possible to untangle the web of deceit and counter-deceit (and incompetence and foolishness) woven by our diplomats and their masters? Exactly what methods are El Pais, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, the New York Times and the Guardian—the newspapers called on to vet [...]

One person who went through some recent jobs data says that: "the average length of unemployment is always higher for the older cohort (45+) regardless of the level of education; generally the more education an individual has, the higher the average length of unemployment." But, but, but what about all those factories who were telling the Times they just can't find anyone to hire?

The last two administrations of New York City government have done a unbelievably poor job with their contracts for affordable housing. Back in 2000, Battery Park City, then 25 years old, was to have provided, on-site or off, 60,000 units of affordable housing, but had only provided a bit more than 1500. That has not improved much! More recently, buildings like 10 Barclay St., a 58-story residential building in lower Manhattan, with 451 units, and a cost of around $185 million, which was recently renting 3-bedrooms for 9+ grand per month, was to have 15 apartments set aside as "affordable housing." In exchange for those units, in 2005, the [...]

Be vigilant, America-your entrepreneurs are on the hook for bigger tax payments! That was the plain moral of an addled page one dispatch from this morning's Washington Post. The bulk of the piece, by Lori Montgomery and V. Dion Hayes, plies the heart-wrenching tale of one Gail Johnson, who operates a multistate chain of preschools out of Richmond, Virginia, and as the possessor of $500,000-plus annual income, faces the prospect of a 19 percent increase in her tax liability, from $120,000 to $143,000.

Never mind that Johnson's resourceful accountant, who has supplied these estimates, has her down for $90,000 in annual deductions-or indeed, that he avers that [...]

Not only are the facts and premise of the documentary Waiting for Superman not at all right, but now we learn that at least one scene was staged for the film. This touching scene from the documentary (the overall storyline of which is: poor people desperately yearning to get into charter and private schools), in which a mother first tours the Harlem Success Academy and oohs and ahs, was actually staged after her child was rejected. Here's the director, Davis Guggenheim, telling the Times about that: "So that scene is real; her reaction, her talking to kids touring the school, is how she would play it." So [...]

Excellent! Wall Street firms claim they're going to stop giving money to political candidates, as retribution over minor regulation. That's not going to be true at all, but it'd be a great start.

An article on Tuesday about people who believe that the Moon landing was a hoax referred incorrectly to a picture in a feature on the Lens blog at nytimes.com. As correctly noted in the feature, "Dateline: Space," the photograph of an astronaut standing on the surface of the Moon shows Buzz Aldrin-not Neil Armstrong. (Mr. Armstrong took the picture.)

Mmm hmm. Sure he did.

Nicholas Lemann, the dean of Columbia's j-school, is a foul pimp selling lies to youngsters for a half-lifetime of crippling debt. Suze Orman should come down from on high and decapitate him with a DVD from the "Complete New Yorker" set.