Being a mostly closed loop, the rightwing blogosphere amplifies some things that deserve it and many things that don’t. The often lamentable circle jerks that result usually come to an unsteady end when the House Seargant-at-Arms explains why Nancy Pelosi uses a bigger plane or a reporter interviews Jamil Hussein. Surprise, two nuggets from today’s news knock down a couple more.
Did Kathleen Sibelius exaggerate that Iraq slowed down the Kansas Guard’s response to a catastrophic hurricane tornado (conceptual dyslexics untie!)? No, she didn’t. Honestly, sensible people can figure out without much effort that sending our best equipment to get blown up in the middle east leaves the Guard with less gear that doesn’t work as well.
Separately, the same CIA who can’t get anything right (just ask Pat Roberts!) predicted fairly accurately what would happen after we removed Saddam. This is even more funny given that yesterday Bush declared, “I’m credible because I read the intelligence.” Logically that means that a president who doesn’t read the intelligence lacks credibility. Apologistas can claim that the pres read this particular bit of intel as soon as they deal with the obvious consequence that the president held his job in ridiculous contempt that he knew about Iraq’s potential to for ethnic chaos but failed to pick up the phone and ask his Defense Secretary to plan for it. Our decider-guy leader looks like a chump either way.
It is fairly easy to understand why the president’s supporters still attack the CIA with such vehemence. Pretty much everybody now sees that every single thing rightwingers said about Iraq in 2002 and 2003 turned out wronger than a Gigli sequel. Iraq had not a thing to do with al Qaeda. In fact, and this is not a small point, the two hated each other. The massive, terrible WMD programs turned out to be a couple of rusted mustard gas shells lost since the Iran-Iraq war. We failed to cow neighboring countries like Iran into submission. Now four years later, every sunny prediction by neocons and their online supporters has proven so off the mark that in retrospect their ideas (cakewalks, candy, flowers) seem practically demented. When you add it all together it seems scarcely possible for a group of human beings to be more collectively wrong about anything. Short of self-medication, the only way to escape a credibility crisis that deep is to pretend that everybody else was just as wrong as you were. Better luck next time, guys.
***Update***
Weird. I call neocon ideas demented and not one minute later I see a report about real candy and (I imagine) real flowers being thrown in Iraq. Self-ownage? I’d hang my head in shame if thought the 2003 neocons were talking about Muqtada al-Sadr.