Onward, Christian Soldiers.

“To paraphrase Al Pacino in ‘Godfather III,’ just when we thought we were out, the Bush mob keeps pulling us back in. And will keep doing so. No matter how hard President Obama tries to turn the page on the previous administration, he can’t. Until there is true transparency and true accountability, revelations of that unresolved eight-year nightmare will keep raining down drip by drip, disrupting the new administration’s high ambitions.” In today’s NYT, Frank Rich makes the case for a full investigation into Dubya-era crimes (as, in a switch, does Maureen Dowd — with some unattributed help from TPM’s Josh Marshall.)

Also linked in Rich’s piece is a damning profile of Donald Rumsfeld’s tenure at Defense by GQ’s Robert Draper, which happens to include these bizarre and, diplomatically speaking, blatantly idiotic Christian-minded cover sheets created especially for Dubya’s briefings. “This mixing of Crusades-like messaging with war imagery, which until now has not been revealed, had become routine…At least one Muslim analyst in the building had been greatly offended; others privately worried that if these covers were leaked during a war conducted in an Islamic nation, the fallout–as one Pentagon staffer would later say — ‘would be as bad as Abu Ghraib.’ But the Pentagon’s top officials were apparently unconcerned about the effect such a disclosure might have on the conduct of the war or on Bush’s public standing…Rumsfeld likely saw the Scriptures as a way of making a personal connection with a president who frequently quoted the Bible.”