Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

One of our two political parties is a cult whose leader admires Vladimir Putin.

Radicalized white males who support Trump are pitching a tent in the abyss.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.

If rights aren’t universal, they are privilege, not rights.

Republicans do not trust women.

Every reporter and pundit should have to declare if they ever vacationed with a billionaire.

This is dead girl, live boy, a goat, two wetsuits and a dildo territory.  oh, and pink furry handcuffs.

Wake up. Grow up. Get in the fight.

If a good thing happens for a bad reason, it’s still a good thing.

Find someone who loves you the way trump and maga love traitors.

One lie, alone, tears the fabric of reality.

There are a lot more evil idiots than evil geniuses.

“Until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on.”

When we show up, we win.

Not loving this new fraud based economy.

“I was told there would be no fact checking.”

I really should read my own blog.

Trump’s cabinet: like a magic 8 ball that only gives wrong answers.

If you are still in the gop, you are either an extremist yourself, or in bed with those who are.

If ‘weird’ was the finish line, they ran through the tape and kept running.

There is no compromise when it comes to body autonomy. You either have it or you do not.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

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Archives for 2003

Walter Pincus- Go Read Spinsanity

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Walter Pincus concludes in today’s WaPo piece:

On March 16, Cheney appeared again on “Meet the Press” and reiterated his views of the previous August about Hussein’s nuclear program. “We know he’s been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons, and we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.” The war began three days later.

Clearly Pincus does not read Spinsanity, because once again, a member of the press fails to use the quotation in the appropriate context. From Spinsanity:

Finally, a dispute has arisen over a quote from Vice President Dick Cheney, who said on the March 16 edition of NBC’s “Meet the Press” that “we believe [Saddam] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.” To date, the assertion remains unproven, and has drawn heavy criticism in the dispute over statements made by the administration in arguing on behalf of a potential war with Iraq. However, as UCLA law professor and blogger Eugene Volokh points out in an article on National Review Online (echoing a point made by a several bloggers), commentators such as New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, Slate’s Tim Noah and Salon’s Joe Conason have neglected to point out the context of Cheney’s statement. Specifically, Cheney said four times in the same interview that Saddam was pursuing nuclear weapons, not that he already possesses them, and the phrase “reconstituted nuclear weapons” makes little sense on its own (why would Saddam give up nuclear weapons if he possessed them?). Volokh argues that Cheney likely misspoke and that he meant to say “reconstituted nuclear weapons programs” or something similar, which is exactly what his aides told the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank (see his May 20 White House Notebook column). Cheney’s critics may believe his statement was intentional, but they owe their readers a clearer picture of the context in which he said it, as do too many other journalists and pundits of late, it seems.

But, as the Daily Howler has pointed out, the press has made up their minds.

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Urain’tium

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If anyone has been found to be a liar regarding this whole uranium non-scandal, it is me, because I proclaimed I wasn’t going to talk about this anymore and then promptly posted 5 pieces on it. Here is one more to complete the package.

At any rate, Kevin Drum, in the comments section of this post regarding Ken Pollack’s pre-war predictions regarding the Iraqi WMD programs (and more specifically, the nuclear capabilities), states the following:

I don’t think Pollack is a liar. I think he truthfully reported the consensus of the intelligence community, which matches what Tenet said about the NIE in October. The CIA *did* think that Saddam had a large and active nuclear program.

Pollack blew it, but the real question is why the intelligence agencies blew it so badly. That story is just starting to come out.

Unfrotunately, the left does not seem willing to extend the same benefit to Bush. Regardless of the partisan shenanigans that the Donks are now engaging in (which appears to be having some serious blowback of its own), the real question is “What is wrong with our intelligence services?”

Let’s start from the top:

1.) I believe Saddam had and continued to possess weapons which placed him in material breech (including long-range missiles, chem and bio weapons, and perhaps part of a nuclear program).

2.) I can also list about 25 other reasons why I was an still am in favor of what we did in Iraq.

3.) Bush’s SOTU address with the infamous line is still not only technically accurate, but according to the Brits COMPLETELY accurate.

4.) The same people who are now in hysterics about Bush lying, even though he didn’t are the same people who all believed and agreed that Saddam had WMD. The only thing that differed was the approach to the issue. Most on the left wanted continued sanctions and inspections.

5.) No one in the House or Senate, and I mean no one, voted for the war because of the line in question. This, of course, is indisputable and undeniable. Pretending that war was not imminent after the Senate vote is merely additional evidence that Democrats and the anti-war crowd suffer from dementia.

All of that is pretty clear, and yet the Democrats are lauching into a full-fledged scandal mode, spinning their own webs of lies and deceit that are so obvious that the Daily Howler has now dedicated TWO days worth of posts pointing out the duplicity. What is going to happen because of all this?

Here are my predictions:

1.) Mucho partisan bickering at House and Senate hearings. Both parties will claim that they have been vindicated by the same testimony, not noticing the irony.

2.) Democrats, in their attempt to find something (“Please, Dear God, give us any issue to run on next year”) to attack Bush with will miss the really relevant issue, which is why are our intelligence services so f——d up? They probably won’t ask the question, because this is something that has taken a while to get to this point. God forbid they accept some accountability from their behavior during the Clinton years.

3.) Republicans, on the defensive, will blame it all on the Clintons.

4.) Tenet will survive, slightly bloodied, and Bush will remain unscathed. In fact, Bush’s numbers will probably increase (a la Clinton impeachment- the public recognizes witch hunts, and I am not sure why politicians have not figured out what clear BS detectors most people have.)

5.) Because the Democrats are in attack mode and the Republicans are in CYA mode (for no real reason), there will be NO FUNDAMENTAL CHANGES to the intelligence services. And that just really pisses me off.

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Here’s Mud In Your Eye

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Although it does not rise to the level of deceit and incompetence that riddled the NY Times under Raines, the Washington Times had their own little crisis to deal with:

A letter to the editor of The Washington Times, purported to be from a senior U.S. diplomat with scathing criticism of the Foreign Service for lack of loyalty to the Bush administration, was exposed yesterday as a forgery.

Wesley Pruden, the editor in chief of The Times, said the newspaper learned “from the highest level at the State Department” that the letter was a hoax and the newspaper fully accepts “as true that the ambassador was not the author of this letter.”

Stephan M. Minikes, ambassador to the Vienna-based Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, writes in an authentic letter to The Times, published in full this morning on Page A18, that the forgery was a “complete and utter fabrication. It was not written by or for me and it expressed views that are diametrically opposite to the views I hold.

“The fact is that never in my long career have I worked with a more dedicated group of professionals than those I have encountered in the Department of State led by Secretary Powell

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The Paper of Record

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Why is the Washington Post the new ‘paper of record?’ Balance:

In the absence of evidence, there has been an extraordinary amount of attention paid to marginal issues — most recently, those 16 words in President Bush’s State of the Union speech that said, accurately, that British intelligence believed Iraq had been seeking to obtain uranium in Africa. In fact, British intelligence did believe that — and still does, even though one set of documents purporting to show an Iraqi procurement mission in Niger proved to be forgeries. Last week the White House announced that the sentence should not have been included in the speech, because the CIA knew of the Niger forgery and had not been able to confirm the broader British report. The claim was deleted from other administration statements, but some White House officials, banking on the British, apparently pressed for its inclusion in spite of the CIA’s doubts. If so, that would represent one of several instances in which administration statements on Iraq were stretched to reflect the most aggressive interpretation of the intelligence.

The piece is titled “Wait for the Facts.” Fat chance.

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Rape on the Rise in Iraq

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Via TalkLeft, this story from the NY Times:

In her loose black dress, gold hairband and purple flip-flops, Sanariya hops from seat to seat in her living room like any lively 9-year-old. She likes to read. She wants to be a teacher when she grows up, and she says Michael, her white teddy bear, will be her assistant.

But at night, the memory of being raped by a stranger seven weeks ago pulls her into its undertow. She grows feverish and has nightmares, her 28-year-old sister, Fatin, said. She cries, “Let me go!”

“I am afraid of the gangsters,” Sanariya whispered in the twilight of her hallway. “I feel like they are killing me in my nightmares. Every day, I have these nightmares.”

Since the end of the war and the outbreak of anarchy on the capital’s streets, women here have grown increasingly afraid of being abducted and raped. Rumors swirl, especially in a country where rape is so rarely reported.

The breakdown of the Iraqi government after the war makes any crime hard to quantify.

But the incidence of rape and abduction in particular seems to have increased, according to discussions with physicians, law-enforcement officials and families involved.

I really am conflicted about this story. First, I do not want to downplay the devestation, fear, and wreckage that rape creates in any society, but I also think that some perspective is necessary. Certainly, in a security vacuum created by the fall of a totalitarian dictatorship, we would expect crime to increase temporarily (particularly since Hussein emptied the prisons of all the violent felons prior to and during the war). What is not available, however, is any way to measure the actual incidence of rape now as compared to before the war. Are there reliable pre-war statistiucs. Perhaps people are feeling more comfortable reporting the rapes now as opposed to before. Perhaps now the rapists are not only Ba’ath party officials, and people can confront the problem. Also, we know that crime statistics are always higher in free societies- after all, we document the crimes, prosecute them, and deal with them in the open, rather than merely walking people behind the ‘police station’, putting a .38 to the back of the accused’s head, and burying them in an unmarked grave.

In short, there is more to this story than the headline would suggest.

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The Failure of Iraq

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It seems that despite the fact that Ted Kennedy and other Democrats are gleefully attempting to claim that the rebuilding of Iraq is a failure, others have different ideas:

What is less expected is the venom with which some in Congress are second-guessing President Bush’s decision to free Iraq. Their criticism is based on two factors: the military’s failure to unearth weapons of mass destruction and the inability to document a pre-war statement made by Bush that Iraq had attempted to acquire uranium from Africa for a revived nuclear program.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., appearing on NBC’s “Today” show Tuesday, said, “There is a broader issue, and that is the failed policy toward Iraq.”

Members of Iraq’s new Governing Council would no doubt disagree. They are jubilant that the tyrant is gone and eager to create a new country in which all religious and political groups have voice. Little wonder that the council, as a first order of business, wanted to create a judicial body to try crimes of the Hussein regime, including the massacre of 8,000 members of the Kurdish Barzani tribe in 1983 and the killing of 300,000 Shiites following the 1991 Gulf War. (The New York-based Human Rights Watch has opposed the idea, saying it would be almost impossible to ensure fair treatment of the accused.)

Second-guessing is inevitable, but the facts remain. Hussein was a brutal and ruthless dictator who had admitted to the possession of 10,000 nerve gas warheads, 1,500 chemical weapons and 412 tons of chemical weapons agents.

Saddam Hussein is gone, and a democratic council is up and running. To call that a failure is to ignore reality.

Democrats ignoring reality is nothing new.

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