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on the latest war crimes...,
2006-06-22 13:34:00
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truman liberals...,
2006-06-22 19:52:48
the ultimate defense against the jihadists is having nothing much up there to behead:
the belief of drooling brainless zombie Rick Santorum that we have already found WMD in Iraq should come as no surprise. Just last March - over two years after these claims were "officially" discredited and long after they proved baseless - polling showed that "Sixty percent of Republicans continue to believe that Iraq had WMD (41%) or a major program for developing them (19%), representing only a modest decrease from the 70 percent who held such beliefs" two years ago, and furthermore, "Sixty-three percent of Republicans believe that Iraq gave substantial support to al-Qaeda, down 8 percentage points from October 2004." You can fool some of the people all of the time, and those are the ones you want to focus on.
It's not difficult to understand why. Conservative media outlets like Newsmax and Worldnetdaily and the moonie have never stopped printing, let alone correcting, headlines about how Saddam's secret stockpiles have actually been found - based on, from today's example, some dusty shells buried in the desert that had long ago degraded into unthreating mass paperweights.
On top of this our friendly intelligence agencies, under the helpful guidance of director John Negroponte, have fueled the propaganda effort by releasing endless reams of internal documents from the regime that have been swept clean by the intelligence analysts but provide no shortage of fuel for the tinfoil hat Weekly Standard/NRO loons like Stephen Hayes to post-hoc justify the pre-war claims by weaving bizarrely undetailed, non-linear tales about supposed exposes the analysts missed like, for instance, this dreadfully unfrightening fax from June 6th, 2001 by the Iraqi ambassador to the Phillipines:
We have all cooperated in the field of intelligence information with some of our friends to encourage the tourists and the investors in the Philippines. ... The kidnappers were formerly (from the previous year) receiving money and purchasing combat weapons. From now on we (IIS) are not giving them this opportunity and are not on speaking terms with them.
Referring to the Abu Sayyaf Group, this demonstrates that Iraq cut off all ties to the group, and isn't particularly clear about where the support that was cut off was coming from in the first place. To Hayes that lack of support for a vaguely associated Filipino seperatist movement translates as an operational tie with Al Qaeda, and, having demonstrated that lack of support years after the invasion, justifies it post-hoc. It's truly stupendous.
And so on and so forth. We should thank Rick Santorum for bringing the sad, brainless disattachment to reality of the conservative movement to national attention, only we suspect the professionals will miss this golden opportunity to bash their competition as the raving conspiracy nuts that they are. My only explanation is that they are too preoccupied by the Clintons' utterly typical sex lives. Then again it could be something else.
update: the NYT covers the nutters but doesn't point out that 2/3rds of the Republican party are true believers. Our lone hero who dares to seek the truth is convinced there's WMD sunk under the Euphrates for the past 15 years feeding the carp. The source of the angst may be the thought that "One of the primary reasons for going into combat was the W.M.D." You really have to be off your rocker at this point if you still believe that, I think, but who am I to judge.
:: posted by buermann @ 2006-06-22 14:23:20 CST |
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