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February 19, 2006

NM-3Y: "Iran-Backed Opposition Enters Iraq"

Three years ago today, NewsMax magazine quietly noted: Iran-Backed Opposition Enters Iraq.

Five thousand troops backed with heavy equipment and under the command of a longtime Iraqi opposition leader have crossed from Iran into northern Iraq, it was reported today.

The Financial Times, in an article reported from Tehran and Washington, said the Badr brigade of the Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir al Hakim, who has been in Iran since 1980, moved into Iraq. Iranian officials told the newspaper the force was defensive.

The newspaper said the Badr brigade was equipped and trained by Iranian forces and could be seen as a proxy force of the Iranian government ahead of any regime change in Iraq.

Yeah, well, not to worry, the Bush Adminstration sent plenty of troops to Iraq to lock down the country and prevent Iranian-back militants from gaining control of the country.

Oh, they didn't? Uh, oh. Don't they read NewsMax?!

Posted by Winston Smith at 11:11 PM | Comments (1)

February 18, 2006

NM-3Y: "Peace Movements Don’t Prevent Wars"

Three years ago today, it was "pick on the protesters" day at NewsMax.

In Peace Movements Don’t Prevent Wars, Barry Farber plays "good cop":

Don't try to dismiss the demonstrators as "the usual suspects." The motleyness of many of them may have indeed inspired an agenda-free 8-year-old in New York to exclaim to his mother, "Mom, this place is filled with freaks!" But drop that line. There were also plenty of normal, sincere, employed, sexually untroubled, freedom-loving and pro-American members of those multitudes.

Live with it. You don't have to denounce them, demean them or question their wholeness as human beings.

And don't quarrel with their numbers; even though major media have a mathematical astigmatism that always – yes, ALWAYS – assigns greater numbers to liberal turnouts than to those right of center. Accept the count and accept the day as an effective registration of their indignation.

Those people who devoted their time, money, energies and bodies to the marches and rallies around the world are not necessarily communists, fascists, Bush-bashers, Saddam-lovers, America-haters, terminally idealistic, naïve or evil.

Thanks, Barry! And then Barry goes on to explain that the fact that America and its allies were going to war anyway despite the enormous opposition amongst their citziens is proof positive that democracy is no longer working, right?

No, he doesn't. He says this:

Peace movements do not prevent wars. Peace movements CAUSE wars. Peace movements, particularly those with good turnouts, convince dictators the other side has no stomach for a fight, even if attacked.

That's right, if millions of us hadn't stood up against the war, Saddam Hussein would have rid himself of the weapons of mass destruction he didn't have and we would have had to go to war to find out that he didn't have them. It's all our fault.

On the off chance that Barry Farber's retarded exposition didn't convince the typical rube that reads NewsMax for news, Daniel J. Flynn provides a comforting ad hominem attack in Are War Protesters Really 'Mainstream'?.

Short answer: "No, they're commies." Longer answer (in part):

CNN paraphrased its own on-scene reporter's observations that "the crowd was diverse, with older men and women in fur coats, parents with young children, military veterans and veterans of the anti-war movement." An AP story quoted a protestor at a Knoxville demonstration stating that he was "surprised it's not just the usual suspects." He maintained, "Bush must be really screwing up to bring out the mainstream."

But did the mainstream really turn out in Manhattan?

(Yes!)

"I almost feel sorry for Saddam Hussein because this is a big, bogus, fake, pretext thing," stated Big Apple resident Barbara Donaldson. "It has nothing to do with weapons of mass-destruction for Christ's sake. It has to do with the fact that we want a permanent base in that area. That's what it's about."

Golly, what a nutcase. I'll bet she'll feel stupid later when Iraq has no WMDs and there are 24 permanent U.S. military bases under construction. Yeah, she'll feel like a grade-A dummy (or DUmmy, as the Freepers say).

Reporters needn't have looked far to find reflexive anti-Americanism coloring the views of other activists in attendance.

Keith Olberman and Media Matters have been roasting Bill O'Reilly in the last few months by simply quoting what he says. No one can make the Falafel Master look worse than the Falafel Master himself. Funny you don't see Freepers digging up quotes like the one above to show how "wrong the lefties were." No, that wouldn't serve them well at all.

Finally, the inexplicable John LeBoutillier chimed in with a piece about rumors of what would become Air America Radio a year later. In No Lib Talk Radio John pronosticates:

Yesterday in the New York Times it was announced that a rich group of liberals – led by Sheldon and Anita Drobny of Chicago, longtime backers of the Clintons and Al Gore – are donating $10 million to finance a "liberal talk show network" around the country.

Their purpose?

To counter what they see as the conservative slant of talk radio hosts around the nation and thus to alter the 'political' trend to the right in this country.

Guess what?

This will be a total flop.

Guess what? It's not. It's beating some of the conservative giants in major markets and has been steadily expanding for the last two years when it started.

The revolution starts... now

Posted by Winston Smith at 10:42 PM | Comments (0)

February 17, 2006

NM-3Y: "Coming Soon to Baghdad – The Preview of the E-Bomb"

WTF is an E-Bomb? Well, it's three years since NewsMax previewed the E-Bomb that learned about through "intelligence reports," so it should be old news, right? Well, it's forgotten news, as is best with so many NewsMax stories.

I can't really do justice to Coming Soon to Baghdad – The Preview of the E-Bomb without quoting the first few opening paragraphs:

It will begin with a sharp crack, like the sound of a bolt of lightning hitting its target. In an instant, Baghdad and its environs will go dark. Even though turned off, fluorescent lights and television sets will glow and the smell of ozone mixed with the odor of smoldering plastic will seep from outlet covers as electric wires arc and telephone lines melt. Palm Pilots will feel warm to the touch, their batteries overloaded. Computers, and every bit of data on them, will be history.

Suddenly there will be a deadly quiet as internal-combustion engines shut down never to be restarted. No Iraqis will suffer any harm – they will simply be thrust back in time to an era where electricity and the electronics it made possible were non-existent.

Saddam Hussein will sit in his silent darkened bunker – suddenly stifling as all air intake systems shut down. With communication with his armed forces arrayed around the capital city no longer operating, he and his top generals will be rendered as mute as the troops in the field themselves. Only by carrier pigeon could be hope to contact his forces.

His missiles inoperative, his tanks without engines, his jet fighters downed, his radar installations useless, Saddam no longer has the instruments of modern warfare at his beck and call. He has been e-bombed back to the stone ages.

That’s the scenario for the opening of the invasion of Iraq if intelligence reports are correct. The age of the e-bomb has arrived and modern warfare will never be the same.

The E-Bomb, it explains, is a nuclear EMP weapons. It might as well be Dr. Who's "sonic screwdriver" for all the reality it has.

Not only did Saddam have no missiles, he had few tanks and no jets. Iraq was pratically in the stone ages when we got there. We just made it worse. Yay, us.

Posted by Winston Smith at 10:35 PM | Comments (0)

February 15, 2006

NM-3Y: "Rumsfeld: Afghan Model for Post-War Iraq"

February 14^th-15^th, 2003, were slow, weekend days for NewsMax, and the most notable article was Rumsfeld: Afghan Model for Post-War Iraq.

The article is full of Rumsfeld bullshit, but you didn't have to wait three years to see that. By this date in 2003, the situation in Afghanistan had begun the deterioration that it is in danger of completing some time in the next two years. As the New York Times had reported, just two days before this article:

The senior members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said today that they were deeply concerned that elements of Pakistan's government were helping to undermine the stability of Afghanistan, including the possibility that they were sheltering Taliban fighters along the border.

"...sheltering Taliban fighters along the border..." — say, isn't that where Osama bin Laden is supposed to be?

Posted by Winston Smith at 09:00 PM | Comments (0)

The Disappearing Beers

If you haven't read about the Cheney hunting mishap yet, there's an interesting article on MSNBC. What's interesting about it is not the information, but how it changes an hour after it was posted. Below is a before/after screen shot. Can you see the difference (hint, it's not the banner ads):

(Click for full-size image)	(Click for full-size image)
Before	After

Update

Firedog Lake has a synopsis of the Cheney interview clips released so far. Turns out, Cheney admits to "having a beer with lunch" — several hours before the incident. Meanwhile, on Planet Freeper, we have morons who are insisting:

Investigators have said there was no indication that alcohol was involved.

What investigators? The ones who were held at bay for 14 hours?

Posted by Winston Smith at 12:08 PM | Comments (0)

The New Faces of Abu Ghraib

A lot of people (read: wingnuts) missed Donald Rumsfelds confession in front of Congress that there were photos of the torture at Abu Ghraib that would shock and horrify anyone who saw them — even heartless "conservative" fucktards. The photos that were released should have lead to a call for Rumsfeld head, but they lacked the obvious brutality needed to prevent assholes like Rush Limbaugh from comparing the torture to fraternity hijinks.

The Syndney Morning Herald has just published 15 of the 60 photos that the ACLU is suing to have released by the DOD. Here's one:

What would the wingnuts say to that? Probably "let's invade Austrailia."

Here is a different image in much higher resolution.

Yeah... just like my college days.

Posted by Winston Smith at 09:14 AM | Comments (0)

Dan Hallagan is an Asshole

It's so predictable it's scary: find a pro-war site touting its objective, rational logic, and you'll find a cornucopia of logical fallacies. Witness Dan Hallagan's Logic Times. It's really tough to pick a good place to start because the site is so rife with fallacies that they're probably embedded in HTML tags. Despite the stiff competition, sinking to the bottom of this morass of arrogance, stupidity and brazen mendacity has to be the utterly offensive essay, Fuzzy Moral Math.

The math is fuzzy, the morals — simply missing.

In short, this sick, twisted piece of "logic" purports to show that the Iraq war is saving Iraqi lives. Prepare to be amazed by the audacity (numbers are taken as of December 5, 2005):

Saddam Hussein became president of Iraq on July 16, 1979 and was deposed in April of 2003. Over that twenty-four year period, Saddam Hussein killed between 600,000 and 1,000,000 Iraqis and was responsible for the deaths of over 700,000 Iranians and Kuwaitis (here and here). Utilizing only the Iraqi numbers, this is an average of between 25,260 and 42,108 people a year, or between 2105 and 3509 Iraqi citizens a month. The United States toppled Saddam Hussein thirty-two months ago now. If Saddam had remained in power for those 32 months, between 67,360 and 112,288 Iraqis would have died...

First off: the numbers are wrong.

If you follow their second "here" link, you'll see a range of civilian casualties from 250,000 to one million. The largest figure with any supporting evidence, however, is 300,000. Where does Hallagan get a lower limit of 600,000? Fucked if I know.

It's certainly not from the citation in the first "here" link (did he even read this information?). The article found there tosses around some pretty big numbers, but those are casualties (mainly) of the Iran/Iraq war — war casualties are not civilians. In terms of civilian casualties, the article offers this estimated maximum:

Mass graves discovered following the US occupation of Iraq in 2003 suggest that the total combined figure for Kurds, Shi'ites and dissidents killed could be as high as 300,000.

Now, 100,000 of those are Shi'a who died in an armed insurrection in 1991, so it's debatable whether they qualify as civilian. We know this number really well because American troops stood on the sidelines — some of them in tears — and did what they were ordered to do: nothing.

But why quibble? According to the sources cited by Logic Times there might be up to 300,000 civilian deaths attributable to Saddam Hussein's brutality. Using the (bogus) calculation contrived by Logic Times, that would equate to an average of 1053 people a month, or a hypothetical 33680 Iraqis who would have died in Hussein's continued reign of terror.

According to Iraq Body Count, there were as many as 31088 Iraqi civilians killed as a result of the invasion at the time the article was written. Logic Times uses the absolute minimum number, 27569, in their calculation to determine that 84719 have been "saved" by the great humanitarian George W. Bush.

Using the maximum (31088) deaths from the U.S. invasion from IBC and the maximum widely-accepted number of deaths from Hussein's rule (300,000), and, again, using Logic Times' own calculations, you end up with roughly 2600 Iraqi's "saved." Not 84719, but 2592.

That's nearly one Iraq "saved" for each American lost. What a bargain!

So, we've spent a quarter of a trillion dollars, over 2000 soldiers killed, and over 16,000 wounded and we "saved" a net of 2600 Iraqis? That's it? Probably not even that. Remember, the "death by U.S." figure is the result of adding up figures from meticulously documented event reports. The "death from Saddam" number is based on a figure that was pulled out of someone's ass.

Given the steady reports of car bombings and executions coming from Iraq, wouldn't you expect that we'd have a net loss as a result of the U.S. invasion? Well, in reality there is a net loss.

If we're going to do this bullshit calculation of "average deaths per month", it should be done for the period after 1991. The Logic Times "monthly average" is bogus because it assumes that life in Iraq was the same during the entirety of Saddam's tenure as President. The fact is that after 1991, the U.S., Britain and France, imposed "no fly" zones in Iraq that effectively protected the Shi'a in the south and the Kurds in the north from large-scale assault by Saddam's military.

If you remember, this was the "containment" that wasn't supposed to be working. Saddam was ready to roll over the entire Arabian peninsula, Iran, and parts of the Pacific Northwest with his nuclear-capable war machine. No doubt that back in 2003, Dan Hallagan was chock full of factoids detailing Saddam's secret military death machine. Meanwhile, back in the real world, Saddam Hussein was no longer a threat to anyone, even the Shi'a and the Kurds.

If we take out the deaths that occurred prior to the U.N. sanctions, we're left with 50,000 to 60,000. These are totals over Saddam's entire term, so not all of them happened in the 12 years of containment. Still, I'm feeling generous so let's pretend they did. That gives an upper limit of 5,000 deaths a month, or 16,000 in the 32-month span Hallagan used for comparison.

That means that during the U.S. occupation — assuming artificially-high death rates under Saddam — over 15,000 additional Iraqi civilians have died than would have under the Hussein regime.

Finally, this sophistry is really indefensible. One Iraqi civilian was too many. One American. One dollar. This war should not have been fought in the first place. I could go on, but Peter Daou already put it perfectly:

This point is often made in the form of a challenge: "Would you rather Saddam still be in power?" But rhetorical questions can go both ways. Estimates of Iraqi civilian casualties range from the low tens of thousands to the hundreds of thousands. Taking 50,000 as an arbitrary number, who tells those 50,000 families that they have to suffer and die to prevent 100,000 other families from suffering and dying under Saddam? Are Iraqi lives fungible? Who plays God? Without an iron-clad moral justification for war, aren't we callously and capriciously toying with matters of life and death?

Again, why Iraq? If the hyped up threat was bogus - which we now know it was - and it wasn't about self-defense, why are we there? What is it about the Iraqi people that requires Cindy Sheehan to give her child for their freedom? Why not liberate the people of Darfur or North Korea? Who tells them that an Iraqi deserves liberation but not them? Bush crows about "progress" in Iraq as though Americans had some unique obligation to ensure progress in that particular country. But if it's simply a matter of "doing good," why not spend $200 billion on cancer research or alleviating poverty or educating the uneducated or boosting safety and security at home so young girls don't get raped and buried alive?

Why spend precious lives and money in Iraq? If the answer is freedom and democracy for the Middle East, one could easily argue that a cure for cancer would be infinitely more beneficial to humanity. Spending $200 billion to find a cure for cancer may be a long shot, but judging from the news, there's a distinct possibility that our $200 billion experiment in Iraq may leave it in a worse state than when we invaded. Wouldn't it make more sense to apply those resources to research that could potentially save tens of millions of lives? And we'd have thousands less Americans killed and wounded, and tens of thousands less Iraqis slaughtered.

The problem with the Bush apologists' reasoning is that using an infinite time horizon - which they are so fond of - virtually any action, no matter how egregious, can be shown to lead to some positive results. It's the bastardization of utilitarianism; asserting a causal relationship between a pre-emptive invasion of a sovereign nation and all future good developments in Iraq and the Middle East may swell the hawks' breasts with pride, but it's a dubious and dangerous way to conduct foreign policy.

As the author, Dan Hallagan, might put it: this proves without any doubt that Dan Hallagan is a complete fucktard.

Posted by Winston Smith at 01:32 AM | Comments (0)

February 14, 2006

Christianity as an Inner Affair

In his article, Stiff Right Jab: Public Christianity, Steve Farrell intends to show that privacy advocates and other individuals who make the assertion that “religion”, especially Christianity, should be a private affair are morally corrupt and ignore the true nature of their faith.

Privacy advocates contend that Christians and Jews have no right to express and defend their religious and moral convictions in the classroom, in the work place or at the seat of government, because faith is sacred, and thus private.

Prohibiting public religious speech under the guise of “protecting one’s private religious rights” ignores the very public, evangelical nature of religion — especially of Christianity.

This assertion forms the thesis for his article which asserts “Christianity is by nature public”. Obviously, Mr. Farrell has ignored key Gospel scriptures as well as church history in order to reach this conclusion. He also does not understand the nature of major world religions other than his own. I hope to address both issues in this installment of my theological ramblings.

The gospels as historical documents

The scriptures of the Jewish and Christian faiths cannot be taken out of the social, political and faith context in which they were written — to do so isolates them from their true meaning. An even worse effect of ripping scripture from its anthropological and historical context is that a believer of any time period can create a “Christ” which betrays the historical Jesus’ message. This has occurred in the past to support Christians’ participation in slavery, colonialism and genocide. Currently, Christians are misusing Holy Scripture to justify war, greed, materialism and the abrogation of the civil rights of all Americans. Whenever we hear of someone using the gospel narratives to support the actions or policy of a government, we need to ask ourselves one question:
Are the words of Jesus being used to further an agenda or philosophy that the itinerant, activist Rabbi would never have held?

Unfortunately, in this case, our answer is:
Yes.

So what happens when we begin to analyze how Jesus would have felt if he was asked about the role of religion in public life? What happens if we try to find out what Jesus of Nazareth would have to say on this subject?

Well, first off, we would not want to do what Farrell has done, which is to grab blindly at citations from the bible without considering the historical context. Ironically, the “sources” which Farrell cites are not, in all likelihood words that Christ even uttered. All of the sources he cites were written decades, if not generations after Jesus of Nazareth taught in Israel. Biblical scholars agree that by the time the faith documents contained in our New Testament were written, the teachings of Jesus had been interpolated to be more accommodating to Gentiles and the Heathen culture of the Roman Empire.

Farrell’s gospel citations are taken for the New Testament book of Mark. The Gospel of Mark, while likely being the first gospel written, still had undergone extensive editing and revising before it entered the New Testament canon. Mark, like the other synoptic gospels, contains several accurate sayings of Jesus placed within a context that would help to make the message they contain more acceptable to Gentiles.

When reading Mark, it is important that we understand where these interpolations occur — so we can decide for ourselves if they affect how the message of Jesus is presented. How can we know where these emendations occurred? In order to answer this question, we must understand the cultural context of the faith community which produced each of the gospel narratives.

The gospel Mark was written shortly after 70 CE, following the First Jewish Revolt. The entire Jewish world was in upheaval from 66-70CE. The very existence of Jerusalem hung in the balance. Everything seemed to point to the end of times as foretold in the Jewish Scriptures. Apocalyptic literature had been gaining popularity during the previous two centuries. Sectarian movements such as that of Khirbet Qumran were teaching that current events were part of a war between forces of dark and light. Social reformers such as Jesus of Nazareth had been killed by the Roman occupation forces for acts of political and religious sedition. Jews were being slaughtered throughout the Empire for rejecting the symbols of cultural polytheism. Christianity was regarded as an aberrant sect of Judaism. The zeitgeist of fear, persecution, and destruction color the entire narrative of Mark.

The gospel narrative I selected to support my thesis is the Book of Matthew. According to the documentary hypothesis of biblical scholarship, the gospel of Matthew was likely written a decade after the Gospel of Mark and the suppression of the First Jewish Revolt by the Roman Army. The gospel document was likely composed for a faith community in Antioch, the Roman Capital of Syria. This prominent Roman province had a Greek-speaking population composed of Gentiles and Jews living side-by-side in a Hellenistic cultural milieu. When the Gospel of Matthew was written, the Church community producing the letter was experiencing a major demographic shift. The number of Gentile church members was swelling while the number of Jewish members remained static. New converts to the faith were Gentiles who had previously been of the Roman Religion . As such, these individuals were largely ignorant of the Jewish cultural background of the faith narratives about Christ. In Antioch, tension was beginning to build between the four cultural groups of: traditionally observant Jews, Jewish Christians, Gentile Christians, and Heathen Gentiles. This cultural dissonance accounts for the conflicts between Jews and Gentiles which are portrayed in the gospel narrative of Matthew.

Viewing the gospels as historical documents does not minimize their validity for a believer. It allows modern scholars and believers to discern the layers of meaning and truth within the documents. The historical approach also allows modern readers to understand that the gospels are ancient faith histories, not modern historical documents that are literally true. Does this analysis mean that the New Testament narratives are fairytales that must be rejected? NO! It just means that when we use gospel narratives to support our beliefs, politics - or whatever - we need to consult other written sources (such as the writings of the Church Fathers) as well as archaeological and historical works about the classical world to tell us what the reality of the first century church was. Scriptures are written in a particular culture for a particular culture, and a failure to understand that culture will result in a failure to understand the Scripture. Only by learning about the cultures of the Bible, can we have the teachings of Christ inform our opinions without using Jesus to support our own socio-political beliefs.

The Scriptures on Privacy of Religion

The beginning of Jesus’ ministry is the first time Matthew contrasts the idea of exterior, public religion with inner, personal faith. Following the arrest of John by Herod, Jesus withdraws to Galilee. It is only by withdrawing that he is able to fully become the teacher and Rabbi he was meant to be. Matthew 4²³ states:

Και περιηγεν ολην την γαλιλαιαν ο ιησους διδασκων εν ταις συναγωγαις αυτων και κηρυσσων το ευαγγελιον της βασιλειας και θεραπευων πασαν νοσον και πασαν μαλακιαν εν τω λαω

He (Jesus) went around all of Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, and curing every disease and illness among the people.

While one could assert that this verse (as well as 9^35-38) means that Jesus was conducting a public ministry, historical context seems to indicate otherwise.

The period when Jesus was active as an itinerant Rabbi in Galilee was not a good time to be preaching publicly — especially if the message which you were spreading was hostile to the Roman occupation forces. Jesus preached in all Jewish communities. In these villages, Aramaic and Hebrew were spoken, Jewish traditions and rites were followed carefully, and religion was a private rebellion against pagan occupation forces. When Jesus was in a homogeneous culture, he was able to preach openly and perform healings. Later, in mixed company, he will use ‘signs’ and ‘parables’ to teach his message covertly, so that those who are not Jewish will not understand.

To Jews of the first century, religion that was conducted in public was either a) pagan or b)done as a concession on the part of individuals who were succumbing to the Hellenizing forces. True faith was having the conviction to reject participation in public rites which compromised the morals or ethics of the believer — no matter what the cost. True faith also meant keeping the precepts of Torah while resisting the yoke of Roman occupation.

It is in this context that Matthew 6¹ states:

Προσεχετε την ελεημοσυνην υμων μη ποιειν εμπροσθεν των ανθρωπων προς το θεαθηναι αυτοις ει δε μηγεμισθον ουκ εχετε παρα τω πατρι υμων τω εν τοις ουρανοις

Beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be noticed by them; otherwise you have no reward with your Father who is in heaven.

This teaching unequivocally states that one should not do good before others in order to be seen. Continuing the sermon, he (Jesus) commands that:

… σου η ελεημοσυνη εν τω κρυπτω και ο πατηρ σου ο βλεπων εν τω κρυπτω αυτος αποδωσει σοι εν τω φανερω

let your giving be in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will repay you.

This teaching is not unique to the New Testament — Judaism also teaches that individuals should give freely and lovingly without accolades; the need for a public thank you or acknowledgement negates any good deed. During the second temple period a system had been worked out by Temple authorities so that giving and receiving of charity was completely anonymous. Both those in need of food, money or goods and those giving items were unknown to the rest of the community. Jesus is saying that the idea behind this system of anonymous charity should extend to all areas of religious life.

The most blatant teaching of Jesus that our faith should not be tied to public religiosity or egotism can be found in Matthew 6^5f:

Και οταν προσευχη ουκ εση ωσπερ οι υποκριται οτι φιλουσιν εν ταις συναγωγαις και εν ταις γωνιαις των πλατειων εστωτες προσευχεσθαι οπως αν φανωσιν τοις ανθρωποις αμην λεγω υμιν οτι απεχουσιν τον μισθον αυτων συ δε οταν προσευχη εισελθε εις το ταμιειον σου και κλεισας την θυραν σου προσευξαι τω πατρι σου τω εν τω κρυπτω και ο πατηρ σου ο βλεπων εν τω κρυπτω αποδωσει σοι εν τω φανερω

When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.

Jesus says here that one is to go to a private place to pray to their heavenly Father. Not on a street corner, not in a school, not in a boardroom. Nowhere that is public. Nowhere their egotism can be fed by people lauding their observance. Faith is a private matter. Even a synagogue is listed by Jesus as a place where egotism can be fed. How you ask? Do you know someone who goes to “the right church” or attends “the right services” just because it’s the “only way to get plugged in” to the “in crowd”? Bingo.

Further on in Matthew, we find another case where our actions among fellow believers can be a form of egotism. In verses 6^16-18, Jesus states:

Οταν δε νηστευητε μη γινεσθε ωσπερ οι υποκριται σκυθρωποι αφανιζουσιν γαρ τα προσωπα αυτων οπως φανωσιν τοις ανθρωποις νηστευοντες αμην λεγω υμιν οτι απεχουσιν τον μισθον αυτων συ δε νηστευων αλειψαι σου την κεφαλην και το προσωπον σου νιψαι οπως μη φανης τοις ανθρωποις νηστευων αλλα τω πατρι σου τω εν τω κρυπτω και ο πατηρ σου ο βλεπων εν τω κρυπτω αποδωσει σοι

Whenever you fast, do not put on a gloomy face as the hypocrites do, for they neglect their appearance so that they will be noticed by men when they are fasting. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. 17 But you, when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face 18 so that your fasting will not be noticed by men, but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.

So what’s the big deal with fasting you ask? Think about it like this: suppose one day you were going to fast… but when you get to the office you discover a co-worker is having a baby, so you’re all going out to lunch together… and someone down the hall is having a birthday, which means cake. How can you gracefully get out of those situations without mentioning your faith or denying your faith? For Jews and Christians of the first century, problems like that came up at every meal — and since meals were public affairs, it was especially tricky… so the admonition of these verses is that in public one should choose the middle ground between bragging about one’s faith and denying faith to fit in. In private one may worship freely because all expressions are made only for the believer or the Father, and are free of egotism.

The word κρυπτω (crypto) and “privacy”

Oh, and one thing that is most interesting in the above verses is the use of the word κρυπτω. In English traditional translations of the scriptures, the word κρυπτω is always translated “secret” — which does fit the idea of “hidden” and “concealed” that κρυπτω usually connotes — but it misses the additional idea of “private”. In these verses, translating κρυπτω as “private” would be best because it would convey the cultural idea that true faith should be done in κρυπτω, where it can be conducted without egotism or wilfulness.

The evangelical nature of world religions

Not all religions practise proselytization. Hinduism, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism come to mind… but I will cover that next time. I’ve typed enough for one rambling.

Posted by Sister Weasle at 01:29 PM | Comments (0)

NM-3Y: "Bush May Have to Use the Atom Bomb"

Three years ago today, NewsMax opined: Bush May Have to Use the Atom Bomb. It's really hard to comment further on madness of this magnitude. The author argues that if Saddam Hussein is developing an atomic bomb, we should nuke him first, making it his fault for not stopping his program. Remember, at the time, Iraq's nuclear weapons program has been completely destroyed for 12 years.

The utter moral outrage of nuking millions of innocent Iraqis is beyond words. Of course, we'd never do that — it would fuck up the oil fields.

Keeping alive the retarded comparison to pre-WWII Germany is an article entitled "History Repeats Itself". Demonstrating no actual comprehension of history, the author repeats the sane "appeasement" strawman we looked at yesterday. The opening line is priceless:

It was hard not to be swayed by Secretary of State Colin Powell’s compelling presentation at the U.N. Security Council.

"Hard not to be swayed..." yeah... if you have the brains God gave a turnip.

Posted by Winston Smith at 12:00 AM | Comments (2)

February 13, 2006

Fully Involved

"I reject outright the suggestion that President Bush was anything less than fully involved," said White House homeland security adviser Frances Fragos Townsend.

Posted by Winston Smith at 06:31 PM | Comments (0)

NM-3Y: "Life on Planet Bizarro"

Three years ago today, NewsMax magazine columnist David C. Stolinsky, M.D. (A doctor? He must be smart!) whined about Life on Planet Bizarro. Dr. Stolinsky proves himself to be an expert on opinions that diverge from reality, all right: his own. The article provides a treasure trove of straw-man arguments that were dutifully repeated throughout the wingnut echo chamber during the run-up to the war.

In the world I grew up in, World War II was the greatest catastrophe in history. We learned the hard way that it is dangerous to ignore its lessons.

In my world, Hitler outlined his violent plans in speeches, but we didn’t listen. He scrapped the treaty that ended World War I, but we paid no attention. And we did nothing when he built up his military, reoccupied the Rhineland, seized part of Czechoslovakia, and then took the rest.

Finally he invaded Poland, and by then it was too late to stop him without a war that cost over 40 million lives.

But on Planet Bizarro, all that never happened. We never learned that we can’t appease violent megalomaniacs. So we try to appease Saddam Hussein.

Nice.

In my world, Saddam Hussein was a threat to nobody. In my world, Adolph Hitler took Neville Chamberlin on a tour of his tank factories. In my world, no one could find any WMD's in Iraq, even though the Bush Administration claimed to know where they were. In my world, only a raving nutcase would think that Saddam Hussein was in a position to start a world war that might cost 40 million lives.

But there ya go.

Of course, wingnuts who read Saddam's Arsenal would be convinced that Saddam Hussein was armed to the teeth. True enough, he was armed to the teeth — prior to 1991.

Meanwhile, in case they had missed the now-discredited claim that Iraq was in league with Al-Qaeda, NewsMax induces pants-wetting in the pee-pee pants conservative cowards with U.S. Warns of al-Qaeda/Iraq 'Nightmare'. This article is just a re-hash of the previous day's Powell: Tape Shows bin Laden 'in Partnership With Iraq'.

Now, to be fair, there were banned weapons found in Iraq. They were however, found and destroy prior to our invasion. Of course, the fact that they were found is something that the wingnuts will never let war opponents forget, despite the fact that this discover proves that the weapon inspections were working.

Many a NewsMax reader wet his pants when he read: U.N. Diplomats: Iraq Rocket Exceeds Limit.

Iraq has missiles capable of reaching more than 112 miles, well outside the permitted range, diplomats from countries on the U.N. Security Council said Wednesday.

Isn't is about 112 miles from Baghdad to New York City? No? Well, Jerusalem? No? Tel Aviv? No?

The limit that these missles were "well outside of" was 93 miles. The new range allowed these missiles to go a little bit over the border into neighboring states. The largest threat would have been to Iran, which, at the time, was being ignored.

Speaking of ignoring things... while the U.S. prepared to immerse itself in a war against the paper tiger, Iraq, North Korea realized that it could just go nuts with nuclear weapons, since Bush couldn't get any allies to help stop it. NewsMax ran a UPI story on this: North Korea in Breach of Nuclear Accord.

If you read the original article, you'll notice a rather glaring difference in the NewsMax version. NewsMax inserts some rather inflamatory section headers:

Cowardly Europe Wants to Appease North Korea Too

...

Clinton's Idiocy Never Dies

God forbid that Clinton's idiocy — or, more precisely, the fervent belief in it — should die, or Bush might actually have to take responsibility for the fucked up shit that happened during his presidency.

Posted by Winston Smith at 09:25 AM | Comments (2)

February 12, 2006

Pee-pee Pants Conservative Cowards

Saddam Hussein has a nuclear bomb hidden in Osama bin Laden's butt! And he's going to set it off in New York and kill all the stupid rednecks in the United States! Quick! Somebody suspend our Constitutional liberties and send our troops to start a civil war in Iraq! Whatever you do, do not — under any circumstances — say anything that might hurt George W. Bush's feelings or he won't protect us from the "terrists"!

Or so goes the subtext of the pee-pee pants conservative cowards. This is a broad group that contains chickenhawks — people who "support" the troops, but wouldn't dream of joining the military or letting their kids enlist — but it covers a lot more. The PPCC's are consumed with fear, mostly fear of stupid things.

I've been reading NewsMax a lot recently, and it occured to me that the psychology of its target audience can, in part, be determined by the banner ads targetted at that audience. Below are all but one of the banner ad images that I found running down the left side a NewsMax page:

Get rich quick schemes, tips for strength, fighting, and longevity... crap. What kind of imbecile would actually pursue the secret for defending themselved by flinging paperclips? The short answer is this: insecure, pathetic pee-pee pants conservative cowards.

Jeebus! Secrets for bagging hot chicks that the "Liberal Media" doesn't want you to know?! Isn't promiscuity supposed to be a liberal vice? Well, if the ads on NewsMax are any indication, the typical NewsMax reader is someone who's desperately afraid of everything — including girls!

Really, it's not a big surprise.

But do they actually wet their pants at the mere mention of the word "terrist"? Well, yes, I'm almost — almost! — certain that they do.

Posted by Winston Smith at 04:52 PM | Comments (0)

NM-3Y: "Consequences of War With Iraq: An Interview With Robert Higgs"

Three years ago today, any suggestion that the war in Iraq would be anything but a glorious triumph that would lead to peace and prosperity in Iraq — and its neighbors — and cheap gas prices here at home, was met with venom and bile from a mob of rabid-right-wing nutcases.

Oddly enough, in the midst of this, NewsMax pulbished a short interview piece: Consequences of War With Iraq: An Interview With Robert Higgs.

I looked for a juicy excerpt, but I couldn't find one — the whole article is a juicy excerpt. There is not one single point Robert Higgs makes that is not entirely accurate.

Why aren't pro-war supporters mortally shamed by what they've wrought? Oh, right, that would require morality.

Indeed, in the same issue with this, was Powell: Tape Shows bin Laden 'in Partnership With Iraq'. Oh, yeah, remember the Al-Qaeda-Iraq links that never existed? Here's NewsMax reporting about a fucking "tape" that purports to connect the two. How convenient. The article contains politically charged text such as, "Will the Appeasers Be Satisfied?"

Will the Appeasers Be Satisfied?

If verified, the tape would go a long way in proving the Bush administration's assertion that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and bin Laden are now working in concert against the interests of the United States and its allies.

"I think when Secretary Powell went to New York and talked about the evidence we have of ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda, he did so on the basis of knowledge, on the basis of fact, and he would not have said it if he didn't mean it and if the United States government and others around the world didn't have cause to know it," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said Tuesday.

"And so what the secretary has alluded to this morning gives further proof of the concerns that we have about Iraq and al-Qaeda linking up."

Appeasers. Heh. So, in one article, they show why patriotic Americans might want to opposed the war, and then they call them "appeasers." Oh, and what are they "appeasing"? A mad-man dictator with nuclear weapons! Well, except he didn't have any nuclear weapons.

Not that Ari Fleisher doesn't play the WMDs angle for all it's worth. "If verified" is thrown out pretty quickly as Ari cites, as fact, the load of malarkey that Powell coughed up in front of the U.N. "Verify" — now there's a word that the neo-cons don't need in their lexicon. We don't hear much about this "smoking gun" tape anymore for the same reason we don't hear about WMDs: it was all bullshit.

Posted by Winston Smith at 02:35 PM | Comments (0)

February 11, 2006

NM-3Y: "Democrats Blast Ashcroft Surveillance Plan"

Three years ago today, NewsMax carried an article with great relevance to the debate today: Democrats Blast Ashcroft Surveillance Plan. The article was remarkably free of slant and rather matter-of-fact about a list of controversial provisions in P.A.T.R.I.O.T. II. Most of these went on to be defeated.

See if these two ring any bells:

• The U.S. Attorney General would gain new authority to conduct wiretaps for 15 days with no court oversight if Congress authorized a use of force or the president declared an emergency.


• Consent decrees that prohibit local police from engaging in spying could be eliminated.

Um, what?

Well, the second item is just plain scary, but the first item is very interesting. We now know at the time that the Federal Government was already conducting wiretaps without warrants. Recently, they cited the onerous FISA requirements that give them up the 3 days to conduct surveillance before getting a warrant. They wanted to expand that to 15 days. Why? Wasn't is legal for them to ignore that law anyway?

While the bill pushed to tear down the privacy rights of American citizens, it sought to elevate the secrecy of government:

• The bill would restrict public access to the risks posed by accidents at industrial facilities that companies are currently required to file under the Clean Air Act.

...

• Changes would explicitly restrict public access to information about government detainees under the Freedom of Information Act.

Remember, just because half the government is under indictment for corruption, doesn't mean you can't trust them! It's the part of personal responsibility, remember! That means you're personal business is their responsibility!

Posted by Winston Smith at 02:13 PM | Comments (0)

February 10, 2006

Rick Moran: A Study in Incompetence

I stumbled across a post by certified imbecile Rick Moran the other day, and like corpses in the streets of post-Katrina New Orleans, I've tripped over another one before I expected to.

Today's knee-slapper was found by following a link from a Balloon Juice post containing more pouty "stop picking on King George" bullshit about why Bush shouldn't be held responsible for the failure of FEMA to adequately respond to the aftermath of hurricane Katrina.

The caterwauling amongst the wingnuts has resumed because of yet more evidence of Bush Administration incompetence. This time, it's in the form of an early warning from FEMA agent Marty Bahamonde. Moran's frenetic, sarcasm-laden "how dare you liberals expect the Federal Emergency Management Agency to actually Manage Emergencies" post is centered on this central theme:

To say that this could have been forseen in the dark, on Monday evening, by a PR “Specialist” is absurd. Again, taking nothing away from Mr. Bahamonde, but if you were Michael Chertoff and received a report that, if acted upon would have meant transferring millions – perhaps tens of millons of dollars of resources, wouldn’t you want that information coming from someone who was in perhaps a little better position to know? Especially when local officials were telling you something totally different.

Here's the problem with what Moran seems to think qualifies as a reasoned argument: Mr. Bahamonde isn't a "PR" specialist, he's a Public Affairs Specialist.

Among the many tasks a PAO can handle is dealing with the media, but that is just part of their over-arching mission to facilitate communication. A FEMA PAO is ultimately responsible for making sure that people know where to go to get help and that everyone — both government and citizen everyone — is informed. In addition, they are to act as liason between these entities and FEMA.

In this context, let's look at the question Moran poses earlier in his rant:

To briefly address the issue about the levee, it appears that the Times, in their continuing effort to blame the Bush Administration for the disaster, have cherry picked one report out of hundreds that were flooding into FEMA headquarters on Monday evening (the day of the storm) and offered it as “proof” that the Administration failed to act in a timely manner with regards to the levee break:

[newspaper excerpt mentioning Marty Bahamonde's Monday helicopter flight over New Orleans]

Mr. Marty Bahamonde, is listed in the FEMA Staff Directory as a “Public Affairs Specialist.” Not to take anything away from Mr. Bahamonde who I’m sure is a dedicated public employee but if the City of New Orleans, the State of Louisiana, and others at FEMA who are more technically competent are telling me one thing and a PR “Specialist” is telling me something else, whose information do you think should be acted upon?

Before answering Moran's rhetorical question, I'd just like to say something about the "continuing effort to blame the Bush Administration for the disaster." Boo hoo hoo; let the facts speak for themselves, crybaby.

Now to answer the question: because that's the way FEMA is supposed to work.

Having "hundreds of reports flooding into FEMA headquarters" could sure hamper effective response efforts. Thus, FEMA has people who's job it is to act as a single point of contact to prevent exactly the kind of confusion that happened. The Mayor of New Orleans and the Governor of Louisianna shouldn't have been talking on the phone with Michael Chertoff — they should have been talking with Marty Bahamonde, and it's Michael Chertoff's fault if they weren't properly redirected. It was Marty Bahamonde's job to collected reports and observations and then provide an assessment to Michael Chertoff.

But Moran raises a compelling question: what about "others at FEMA who are more technically competent"? Well maybe they should have had Bahamonde's job because PAO's are also responsible for initial damage assessments, especially prior to official FEMA engagement. Specifically, they are tasked with assessing the scope of the disaster response. I don't think it would have helped if any of these hypothetical experts had been involved since Marty Bahamonde's report was entirely accurate.

By ignorantly painting Mr. Bahamonde as some kinds of "PR flack" or glorified spokesperson, Moran tries to excuse the Bush Administration for ignoring the information that he is officially assigned to gather.

Moran links to the FEMA site where readers can see for themsevles that Marty Bahamonde is a "Public Affairs Specialist." Rick seems quite proud of himself for digging up this nugget of information. Perhaps he could have done a little research into what PAO's actually do.

Holy fuck, these wingnuts are fucking imbeciles.

Posted by Winston Smith at 07:12 PM | Comments (0)

NM-3Y: "Oil Prices May Drop with War"

Before the war, there was one things that above all would elicit self-righteous tirades if not apoplectic rage from wingnuts: just say, "No war for oil."

"The Iraq war wasn't about oil!" you would be told at 115db's with extra spittle. The war, we were endlessly reminded was about saving the world from Saddam's WMDs — and don't you forget it! At least not until early 2005. Since then, the war has been about liberating Iraq and bringing democracy to the Middle East. They had to switch the narrative because it turns out that if you go to Iraq, you won't find any WMDs. You won't find democracy either, but thank Jeebus, few Bush supporters are foolish enough to venture into the war-torn hellhole that we created in Iraq.

What passes for the democractically-elected government of Iraq has asked us to leave, but how about the rest of the Middle East? Well, Iranian moderates have lost power and the Palestinians are now represented by a hated terrorist origanization. Freedom on the move!

It really would behoove the Bushies to change their tune to "the war was about oil," because that's something that you can actually find in Iraq, and let's face it: that's what they all wanted.

After calming down from their "no war for oil?!" outburst, many wingnuts would gladly admit that — hey — who doesn't like cheap gas?

So no big surprise that three years ago today, NewsMax published a carefully-worded article: Oil Prices May Drop with War. Whoo-hoo!

The prediction was based on the ability of the Saudis to drastically increase production, as well as release stockpiles from the oil reserve. The stockpiles were released, but oil went up anyway. Why? Because the oil industry figured out something that most Americans couldn't: the Saudis can't increase production.

This prognostication was just more of the bullshit wishful thinking that NewsMax and its excreable ilk churned out in the propaganda war before the Iraq war.

Posted by Winston Smith at 06:09 PM | Comments (0)

February 09, 2006

NM-3Y: "Poll: Hillary Would Win"

Thanks to the Republicans, and Karl Rove in particular, modern politicians no longer govern — they just campaign. Thus, although there was no election in 2003, it was still an "election year" for the party that things every year is an election year.

Polls that look at, say, a presidential election nearly two years in advance provide little information. Three years ago today, NewsMax ran the results of a poll asking about who people would vote for in a presidential election. Out of all of the possible Democratic challengers, all would have lost to President Bush, but Hillary Clinton would have lost with the least, garnering 43% of the hypothetical vote.

This poll was a little about Bush's re-election chances, but mostly about name recognition amongst prominent Democrats. It shouldn't be any surprise that more people knew the name "Clinton" than others, but what NewsMax never mentioned was that John Kerry and Dick Gephardt drew percentages (42%) that were within the margin of error (2.7%) of Hillary's total.

An honest article would have claimed "Clinton, Kerry and Gephardt Most Popular Democratic Presidential Candidates" or something like that. NewsMax entitled their coverage of this with the title "Poll: Hillary Would Win." Cleverly, they didn't say "win the election," because the poll showed Bush winning. The article explains that she would win the candidacy, so what's up with the title?

Well, if you've read any of this series, you've figured out that NewsMax isn't about articles, it's about titles. NewsMax "readers" are dull-witted rubes and probably don't read many of the actual articles. As I pointed out yesterday, wingnuts often cite articles that directly contradict them, making it obvious that they didn't read past the title, or the first paragraph.

The title — the most important part of a NewsMax article — raises the specter of something that terrifies wingnuts more than anything: President Hillary Clinton. These nutjobs can't obesses enough over how popular Hillary Clinton is. I kid you not, in 2004 I read a comment of Free Republic in which the author predicts a last-minute coup by the Clintons in which Kerry was replaced by Hillary. I swear to Jeebus that more than a few Freepers thought this was a likely scenario.

Personally, I don't like Hillary Clinton that much, and I don't know anyone who wants to see her oppose the Republicans in 2008. The wingnut pundits made noise about the fact that someone shouted out "our next President" after a Hillary reference at Mrs. King's funeral, and the crowd went wild. What these drooling goons "failed to mention" was Bill Clinton replying, "No, no, no." It seems like Clinton is testing the waters, but I doubt she'll get the nomination.

The concept of Hillary Clinton running for President is a galvanize the wingnut base against the Democrats, because statistically, not all that many people are for the Republicans, and Bush in particular.

On the same topic, NewsMax also ran a base-energizing piece,Bush Vulnerable in 2004?. In this, they report "concern" about Bush's low poll numbers. Oh, he should have such low poll numbers these days.

Posted by Winston Smith at 02:40 PM | Comments (0)

February 08, 2006

Oh, Those Pesky Pro-War Imbeciles

It's not fair to call someone an imbecile for making a mistake — or even several mistakes. It is however fair to call someone an imbecile for ceaselessly repeating a thoroughly discreditted claim. Of course, no pro-war rationale is ever thoroughly discreditted enough for the wingnuts, hence the fanstasy-based community forges on with false crap they desperately wish was true.

Recently, I've started a daily series re-visiting NewsMax articles to highlight how incredibly wrong their pro-war prognostications were. I challenge the wingnuts (any reading this blog) to try the same thing with Truthout.org or Alternet.org. I'm sure that there are a few bad calls that you could dig up, but not several each day.

One stinker that I overlooked a couple of days ago was U.S.:Syrians Hiding Iraqi Weapons for Cash. This article trots out what has become a favorite wingnut talking point for the last three years: Saddam Hussein had WMDs, he just moved them to Syria. This particular claim has attracted a mob of imbeciles who think it counters the sad reality that we went to war in Iraq over an entirely fictional threat. "If only Saddam did have WMDs!" say the Wingnuts, becoming slightly aroused by the mere thought.

As the NewsMax article points out, even the Bush Administration doubted this claim. Many analysts — including those in the Bush White House — thought that the Israeli-sourced story was an attempt to aim Bush's mindless war machine at Israel's bitter enemy in Damascus. There were satellite images showing people leaving Iraq for Syria, but there isn't a single shred of evidence that they were shipping WMDs; in fact, the opposite it true.

This "weapons to Syria" claim has come back with a fury, due to "new evidence." I'll get to that in a bit, because I'm going to review a a post on the appropriately-named "Right Wing Nuthouse", in which the author reviews the old evidence and crows about the latest "revelations". Note that this blog lists NewsMax in its "media" links, so we're talking about someone who is woefully misinformed in the first place.

Ranking imbecile, Rick Moran, first trots out this canard:

But something always bothered me about this conclusion, a nagging itch at the back of my mind. And that is the overwhelmingly belief by the world’s best intelligence agencies that Saddam did indeed have stockpiles of WMD in the six months leading up to the war. The French, the British, the Germans, The Israeli’s, the United Nations (UNSCOM and IAEA), not to mention the CIA, DIA, and most politicians here in this country.

That’s quite a number of people to be dead wrong about such a huge issue.

Actually, the really hard-to-believe thing was summarized nicely by Peter Daou:

There we were, more than a decade after the first gulf war, two years after 9/11, and Saddam hadn’t attacked us, he hadn’t threatened to attack us. And then suddenly, he was the biggest threat to America. A threat that required a massive invasion. A bigger threat than Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Iran, Bin Laden. A HUGE, IMMEDIATE threat. It simply defied belief.

The simplistic claim that "everyone" believed the WMD myth is demonstrably false. Daou obviates that issue with this nicely succinct counter-point from THE STRAW MEN OF IRAQ: Ten Pro-War Fallacies:

The issue is not whether people believed Saddam had WMD (many did), or whether there was any evidence that he had WMD (there was), it's the fact that Bush and his administration made an absolute, unconditional case with the evidence at hand, brooking no dissent and dismissing doubters inside and outside the government as cowardly or treasonous. That's what "manipulating the intelligence" and "misleading the public" refers to, the knowing exaggeration of the case for war (whether by cherry-picking intel or using defunct intel or by speaking about ambiguous intel in alarming absolutes).

Off to a bad start, Moran's arguments actually get weaker from there.

It bothered Charles Duelfer also, the fair minded and thorough former CIA and State Department expert who also took a turn as an inspector for UNSCOM. In his report on WMD, one little noticed caveat that Duelfer mentioned appeared in an addendum to the document:

Moran goes on to cite — not the report itself — but the Washington Times:

The CIA’s chief weapons inspector said he cannot rule out the possibility that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were secretly shipped to Syria before the March 2003 invasion, citing "sufficiently credible" evidence that WMDs may have been moved there.

This statement would come as a total surprise to anyone who'd actually read the actual report adenda.

ISG formed a working group to investigate the possibility of the evacuation of WMD-related material from Iraq prior to the 2003 war.

...

Whether Syria received military items from Iraq for safekeeping or other reasons has yet to be determined.

It should be noted that no information from debriefing of Iraqis in custody supports this possibility. ISG found no senior policy, program, or intelligence officials who admitted any direct knowledge of such movement of WMD. Indeed, they uniformly denied any knowledge of residual WMD that could have been secreted to Syria.

...

Based on the evidence available at present, ISG judged that it was unlikely that an official transfer of WMD material from Iraq to Syria took place. However, ISG was unable to rule out unofficial movement of limited WMD-related materials.

So, basically, the Duelfer report says that there is "sufficiently credible" evidence to warrant "further investigation," but he specifically states that there is no evidence to substantiate the claim.

Importantly, the addendum casts serious doubt that the any Iraqi official ordered any material transfer. It doesn't rule of the possibility that some stashes were looted and moved to Syria — a possibility underscored by the fact that the investigation was halted due to the deteriorating security in the country (Iraq, a country "liberated" and held by U.S. forces was too dangerous for a military survey group to operate!).

The fact that the Duelfer Report Addendum makes is explicitly clear that no Iraqi official ordered a transfer of material is significant in the context of another of Moran's supporting sources:

And now we have a former Iraqi Air Force General who says that massive amounts of WMD was flown to Syria prior to the invasion.

Apparently, "the fair minded and thorough former CIA and State Department expert who also took a turn as an inspector for UNSCOM" somehow forgot to talk to this guy. Right.

The idea that dangerous material was looted in the botched post-war occupation was raised by former UNMOVIC head, Hans Blix last year. Dual-use equipment remained in the country, subject to UN inspection, and since the invasion, Blix and his collegues have collected satellite imagery suggesting that this equipment was missing. Had we not invaded, the UN teams would still have been monitoring those sites. At the very least, we could have sent in sufficient forces to secure them before they were looted.

Startlingly, Moran cites an AP article explaining this Bush Iraq War embarassment. Why? I'll let him explain:

Finally, there was this story about the UN losing track of WMD prior to the war and what satellite imagery showed:

What Moran's citation proves is that he and all the wingnuts praising his article have the reading comprehension of hampsters. Right beneath this characterization, Moran quotes the following from the article:

U.N. inspectors have been blocked from returning to Iraq since the U.S.-led war in 2003 so they have been using satellite photos to see what happened to the sites that were subject to U.N. monitoring because their equipment had both civilian and military uses.

First of all, this article isn't talking about WMDs, it's talking about dual-use equipment, but that's not the most retarded thing about Moran's description of the article.

This article is about material being removed after the war. After. Not before. After.

But, wait, there's more.

What really qualifies Moran ask a high-level imbecile is found in the section entitled "Update III: The Saddam Tapes." This is the "new evidence" mentioned in the beginning of this post. Apparently, someone has unearthed recordings of Hussein talking on the phone and there is a claim that he discusses his WMD programs.

These tapes have just come to light, and contain over a dozen hours of phone calls. Saddam Hussein can't speak English, so they are undoubtedly entirely in Arabic. This means that it will be weeks, possibly months, before they have been fully transcribed, translated and analyzed for authenticity. Bottom line: we have no idea what's on those tapes, or whether it's even credible.

I'm sure that the wingnuts are defrosting the crow that we anti-war bloggers were supposed to eat after Saddam's WMD stockpiles were exposed to the world. My prediction, based on the fact that the pro-war side has yet to get anything right, is that the crow dinner will be going back in the icebox again. That, however, is not why I label Moran a particularly acute imbecile: it's the fact that he popped a woody over this Syria story before he knew why it was back in vogue. He didn't know there was any new evidence... he was just clinging to the old, discreditted talking points.

The article has a lengthy set of comments and track-backs demonstrating the vacancy of the wingnut echo chamber. I don't have time to go after all their bullshit, but maybe I will if some of them respond here.

Posted by Winston Smith at 10:15 AM | Comments (0)

Free Speech Includes Hate Speech

Do you love free speech? Who doesn't? Do you hate muslims? Well, that's pretty popular, too!

Why not advertise both political stands with a shirt from a conservative t-shirt vendor? It's the perfect t-shirt to wear while writing blog entries about how glad you are that Cindy Sheehan was arrested for wearing a t-shirt.

Posted by Winston Smith at 09:29 AM | Comments (0)

NM-3Y: "U.S. Raises Terror Alert to 'High'"

Three years, and three days ago today, Colin Powell gave his humilating performance in front of the U.N. Security Council. The next day, NewsMax provided a summary of the world's reaction. Despite obvious attempts to highlight the positive, the article couldn't hide the global consensus: Globally, a Mixed Reply to Powell Speech.

Powell has since apologized for giving the speech, and his former Chief of Staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, has recently labelled it "a hoax on the American people." Scraping the wingnut barrell, looking for strong supporting quotes, the article cites an editorial from the Austrian newspaper, Die Presse:

"How many 'smoking guns' did foreign countries have before 1945 to prove the existence of German extermination camps?" the Austrian daily asked.

I don't really know the answer to that question, but I do know that it doesn't matter. America entered World War II because Hitler declared war on us and Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.

If we, as a country, had given a damn about the extermination of Jews, we'd had the better part of a decade to demonstrate that. No doubt that Die Presse published that comment in the context of the popular historical fib that the average German (or Austrian) was shocked — shocked, I tell you! — to discover that the Jews were being mistreated by the Nazi regime.

Most people on the planet flipping the collective bird to Powell's speech. Even those who expressed "concern" still unwilling to back military action. What could the Bush Administration do to keep the support of the American public? What about raising the terror threat!

The article, U.S. Raises Terror Alert to 'High' trots out a vague — and ultimately empty — terror threat:

Attorney General John Ashcroft said U.S. intelligence shows al-Qaeda might seek to strike "soft targets" such as apartment buildings or nightclubs at home or abroad.

Anyone remember that happening? Anyone? Well, thank Jeebus for that color-code! It probably saved us all!

With absolute no sense of irony, the article notes this timing:

That warning was issued one day after Secretary of State Colin Powell presented detailed evidence that Iraq was in further material breach of a U.N. resolution requiring the country to disarm, airing in public for the first time detailed evidence of the country's mobile biological weapons labs, research into unmanned aerial vehicles and the mounting of sprayers on Soviet-made MiG fighters.

Wow! Two contrived national security threats in one week! And it wasn't even an election year.

Since NewsMax was on such a laugh-riot roll, hilarity in the guise of a news roundup was published under the headline: Insider Report: Sen. Chris Matthews?.

This "Insider Report" is apparently available as an email subscription and boasts that it is "Special from NewsMax's Most Informed Sources." More accurately, this piece appears to be Informed from NewsMax's Most Special (as in "short-bus special") Sources. Okay, I'm kidding. That comparison was insulting to the mentally challenged, and frankly, it's probably true that this crap came from NewsMax's best sources.

The article enumerates seven "Insider Report" items:

1. Sen. Chris Matthews?
2. Counter Clinton Library Has Terry McAuliffe Browsin
3. Florida's 'Other' Senator for Veep?
4. Russians Like U.S. Less Than Iraq
5. War Date Set for Saudi Convenience?
6. Beijing's Korea Goal: Oust U.S. From Asia
7. Great Deal on John Grisham's Latest

I'll start with #7. This is an advertisement — nothing more — for a way to get a free John Grisham book by purchasing something from NewsMax. It was probably a subscription — the page with the offer is no longer on the site. In any case, that's news you can use, right?

Item #1, predicts that Chris Matthews will run for Senate in 2004. Um, didn't happen.

Matthews had a long career as a staffer to top Democrats including Tip O'Neil and Jimmy Carter. This allows Freepers and NewsMax readers to pretend that Matthews is a staunch Democrat, even though he has become a neo-con wingnut in recent times. Matthew is best known for his talk show, on which he has he has become completely unhinged.

Thus, Matthews did not become a Democratic challenger for Arlen Specter's seat, he became another Bush spokesman with a TV show. Who saw that coming? Certainly not the readers of "Insider Report" or the "best sources" at NewsMax.

Item #2 is also worth re-visiting. The "Counter Clinton Library" was a new-con wet dream: a psuedo-academic institution enshrining all of the vacant Clinton-bashing for which publications like NewsMax were created. NewsMax itself points out that it was the first publication to announce this project. It also calls it a "grassroots effort by several prominent Americans," demonstrating that the right-wing doesn't know what "grass roots" means.

If you Google for "Counter Clinton Library," you will find doezens of rabid right blog posts oozing with glee about the incipient tourist attraction — many going as far as to predict that it would attract more visitors that the official Clinton Presidential Library.

It didn't.

In fact, it drew no visitors. Despite its "prominent" backers, the project folded. Boo hoo.

Item #3 predicts Florida's Bill Nelson to be the front-runner for the Democratice Presidential candidate in 2004. Unfortunately, Mr. Nelson will have to wait until 2008 for his chance to have Karl Rove's minions label him the biggest traitor in America history and a terrorist sympathiser.

Item #4 is based on an actual fact. Most Russians opposed the war in Iraq. This item whines about it. Then again, while 60% of Russians felt that Russia should stay out of it, only slightly fewer Americans (by percentage) felt the same way at the time. Today, roughly that percentage of American's say the war was "a mistake" and think Bush is a lousy president. See, Americans and Russians aren't all that different.

Item #5? Weird. If true, it is further proof that there wasn't any hurry to stop Saddam Hussein. Also points out our desperate need to placate the Saudis to get any support for the war. Given the track record of this peice, I'd say that this item is probably bullshit.

Item #6 is yet another NewsMax entry about how dangerous China is. Again, I ask, why then, are we letting them finance our war against a country that wasn't a threat? Oh, the genius of Bush!

Posted by Winston Smith at 08:18 AM | Comments (0)

February 07, 2006

How to Shock a Freeper: Endorse Peace and Freedom

I've noticed that Free Republic is on a downward spiral, but this latest post has changed my mind. It's not a downward spiral, it's a nosedive.

OK, ready for the "money quote"?

Deciding to desecrate the funeral of Coretta Scott King , the former president decided to ignore the grief of the King Family, to throw away the teachings of Martin Luther King Jr., and focused his speech on attacking the President of the United States. Why? Because he could so he did.

This is the essence of hate.. Why the Left Wing is so bereft of leadership, bereft of a path, bereft of morals. Their whole platform is simple hate."I hate the President", "I hate the USA", "I hate Children", "I hate the fact you have more money then me".. That is their platform.

"Jimmy Carter" and "essence of hate" don't really connect for me, so I looked around for a transcript of Carter's speech. I couldn't find one, but the New York Times reported some of the comments:

Former President Jimmy Carter talked about the nonviolent struggle for justice that the Kings tried to promote, a veiled reference to the war in Iraq. "They overcame one of the greatest challenges of life, which is to be able to wage a fierce struggle for freedom and justice and to do it peacefully," he said.

He also noted that Dr. King had been the subject of wiretapping by the F.B.I., a reference that recalls the Bush administration's controversial decision not to seek warrants for eavesdropping on some electronic communications related to the efforts against Al Qaeda.

"It was difficult for them personally with the civil liberties of both husband and wife violated, and they became the targets of secret government wiretapping and other surveillance," Mr. Carter, a Democrat, said of the Kings.

The former president also said that if anyone believed that the civil rights struggle was over, "we only have to recall the color of the faces of those in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi who are most devastated by Katrina to know that there are not yet equal opportunities for all Americans."

Let's see: Carter praised effective, peaceful demonstration. Why would that be hate for Bush? Just because Dubya launched an expensive and botched military campaign against a threat that didn't exist doesn't mean we don't totally love every little bit of him!

What about those snide remarks about illegal domestic spying? Well, it's a historical fact that the Kings were the subjects of illegal domestic spying. In contrast, Bush has made it very clear that he didn't break the law because he didn't like the law that he broke. I don't see how these comment could apply to Chimpy!

Finally, Carter highlighted to ongoing struggle of African-American by reminding us that the people floating face down in New Orleans were black people. Again, why would that apply to President Bush? Bush didn't drown those people! He was on vacation, playing guitar and riding his mountain bike around his pig farm in Crawford.

Whatever the case, haven't the Freepers already concluded that everything that went wrong during hurricane Katrina was Clinton's fault?

Oh, methinks thou doth protest to much, Mr. Freeper! Carter's words were meant to highlight the importance of Corretta Scott King's efforts on behalf of civil rights. The fact that they burn the wingnuts so severely is just evidence that they too know they are guilty of helping to erode the rights that Mrs. King fought for.

The Freeper finishes with this demand:

I Demand that Ex-President Jimmy Carter immediately apologize to the King Family and to Apologize to the American People for his hate speech!

What an imbecile. There isn't any evidence that the King family objected to anything Carter said. It's their job to demand an apology if they did. In fact, the man who originally joined forces to launch Dr. King's civil rights movement was even more explicit in his anti-Bush message:

The Rev. Joseph Lowery, who co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Dr. King, was even more pointed in remarks he had put in verse form.

"She extended Martin's message against poverty, racism and war," he said. "She deplored the terror inflicted by our smart bombs on missions way afar.

"We know now there were no weapons of mass destruction over there," he said. "But Coretta knew and we knew that there are weapons of misdirection right down here.

In your face, Freepers!

Posted by Winston Smith at 04:46 PM | Comments (0)

Freeper Weirdness of the Day

There was an odd post on Free Republic today:

Anyone know if LGF is experiencing another Denial of Service attack from the muslims again today?

"LGF" refers to wingnut site "Little Green Footballs." Apparently, they're being cyber-terrorized by "muslims." Hmmmm.

Methinks it's time they added another layer of tinfoil to their hats.

Posted by Winston Smith at 03:25 PM | Comments (0)

NM-3Y: "A Short Geostrategic History of Christendom"

Three years ago today was a slow news day for NewsMax. Being a Friday, they wrapped up the weeks news, figuring out how to blame Clinton for everything. Mostly, they were blaming Clinton for the space shuttle disaster earlier in the week, but Lev Navrozov took time out to blame Clinton for everything else in A Short Geostrategic History of Christendom.

I think a better title would have been "An Incoherent Geostrategic Fantasy," but that's why I'm not a NewsMax editor.

Navrozov writes:

Before the 20th century, the Western and Russian statesmen did not have to be intelligent — for about four centuries the West and Russia had firearms and later machine firearms and "colonized" the countries that had no machine firearms or no firearms at all.

...

Even if it is true that Iraq conceals 25 tons of anthrax, this is a puny quantity compared with the former Soviet, possible future Russian or Chinese output. But one U.S. senator has found an image, admired by many of his colleagues. You see, 25 tons of anthrax are 20 million teaspoons of it! That is, 20 million Americans may be poisoned! This is what Iraq can do.

...

Perhaps the future suicidal terrorists would explode themselves with nuclear bombs, and here the sources are many and plentiful, but Iraq is not among them, even according to the CIA.

OK, follow that? Iraq's not really the problem, China is. So why did we invade Iraq while selling the U.S. economy to the Chinese? Well, there's only one answer you'll find at NewsMax: it was Clinton's fault.

Don't bother reading this article. It's monumentally stupid.

Another long, laughable article asks the sabre-rattling question If Not Now, When?. After a great deal of bluster, the article ends with some questions. Its list of "why war is good" rhetorical questions really summarize the appalling ignorance of the author:

• Ask them who got rid of slavery: Harriet Tubman or Ulysses S. Grant?
  
  [Um, it was President Lincoln. -ed]
  
  
• Ask them who got rid of Hitler: Gandhi or the Allied armies?
  
  [See, he should have said "Lincoln or the Allied armies" because neither Lincoln nor Ghandi fought the Nazis. -ed]
  
  
• Ask them what precipitated the fall of the Soviet empire: Jimmy Carter’s appeasement or Ronald Reagan’s defense buildup?
  
  [Historians agree that the Soviet Union was in decline anyway. Reagan's contributions to that decline are debatable, at best. -ed]
  
  
• Ask them who freed Afghan women from Taliban oppression: radical feminists or American soldiers?
  
  [A small, and dwindling, number of Afghans are free of Taliban oppression, so radical feminists were nearly as successful at this as were American soldiers. -ed]
  
  
• Ask them who is dismantling al-Qaeda: obstructionist Democrats or the U.S. armed forces?
  
  [Osama bin Laden is issuing fresh threats. Al Qaeda is killing more people than it ever has. I'd say it's pretty evident that no one is dismantling al Qaeda. -ed]
  
  
• Then ask them who will remove the threat of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction: Kofi Annan and Sean Penn, or George W. Bush and Tommy Franks?
  
  [Hey! How about Harry Potter! Or Superman! After all, why not send a fictional character after a fictional threat — fewer American soldiers die that way. -ed]
  
  

'Scuse me. Gotta go puke.

Posted by Winston Smith at 01:12 PM | Comments (1)

NM-3Y: "Pondering War"

Three years ago yesterday, NewsMax readers were introduced to a new definition of the verb ponder: to ramble on about paranoid delusions. This new definition was courtesy of an editorial by Chris Ruddy entitled Pondering War. This article was the second in a series, and Ruddy frames the need for war thus:

The importance of acting early is underscored by remembering Bill Clinton.

Had Clinton taken steps during the 1990s, even small ones compared to President Bush, we would not be in the crisis with Iraq and North Korea.

That’s right, on February, 6, 2003 — at a time when no one thought the situation in Korea was dire, and only the easily-duped thought Iraq was a threat — Chris Ruddy was saying the situation in Korea was dire and that Iraq was a threat. Nowhere in the article does Ruddy substantiate this, rather he uses a form of coded language to tell the typical NewsMax reader that his assertions require no further verification; he says "Clinton did it."

Clinton acquiesced to Saddam after Saddam failed to abide with U.N. resolutions. Clinton even lifted some of the embargo restraints that had been in place to enforce the U.N. sanctions against Iraq.

Should there be any surprise that Iraq is still playing games and acting defiantly?

That’s right: thanks to Bill Clinton screwing up, Saddam Hussein is going to destroy us all with nukes and nerve gas! I mean, what the fuck kind of mental patient would actually have thought this:

Still, so much time has elapsed, I wonder if Saddam now has pre-positioned mass-destructive weapons here in the United States or has already given assistance and aid to al-Qaeda to strike us shortly before this war begins, or after.

Yeah, Chris, no doubt some of Osama bin Laden’s brothers dropped off the WMDs on their way to visiting Bush in Crawford.

Ruddy does express some surprise that the U.S. is still essentially funding the regime by buying some much oil from it. We don't hear much about that in NewsMax these days, thanks to the "Oil-for-Food Scandal" investigation finding its way to the White House and Bush oil industry cronies.

At the bottom of the article is an "Editor’s Note," that explains Ruddy’s bizarre thesis: he’s hawking a book about how 9/11 was Clinton’s fault. At the time, Bush’s excuse for not taking the blame was "I just got here." Now we know that the attack, just 8 months into his presidency, was an indication of what an aggressive failure Bush is. We also know that Saddam Hussein had no WMDs and Iraq posed no threat. Iraq is now embroiled in violence, the entire region is destabilizing, and we’re now worried about nuclear adversaries that were barely on the radar in 2003.

Naturally, Ruddy has to attempt to compare the NATO intervention in Kosovo with the upcoming invasion of Iraq:

Even Bill Clinton, when he declared his "wag the dog" war on Yugoslavia used the full power of NATO without ever going to the United Nations for support.

Shouldn't it make one a little suspicious that Bush can't even get NATO to help him with the "serious problem" of Iran. Besides, Clinton’s war in the former Yugoslavia actually succeeded in bringing peace and has cost the U.S. very little. Ruddy suggests a great way to cut down on the cost of regime change in Iraq:

Wouldn’t a $1 billion reward for the elimination of Saddam be so much more practical and sensible than spending $25 billion to $100 billion on a war?

$25 billion to $100 billion?! Try half a trillion, motherfucker. I hope Chris sold a lot of fucking books.

Also good reading for that day was Rumsfeld Defends War Commander, an article about how CENTCOM chief, General Tommy Franks was facing a corruption probe (oh who can keep track of all the corruption in the Bush Administration?).

Posted by Winston Smith at 12:06 PM | Comments (0)

February 05, 2006

NM-3Y: "Exposed: Iraq's Biological, Chemical and Nuclear Weapons"

Three years ago today, then Secretary of State Collin Powell embarrassed himself and the United State of America in front of the U.N. Security council and other gathered delegates. He did this by promoting an insultingly hokey case supporting the allegation that Saddam Hussein was a great threat to anyone outside of Iraq.

NewsMax dutifully published Powell's speech as gospel truth in two segments titled "Exposed: ...".

In the same issue, there was also a feeble attempt to invoke the just war doctrine. This screed first misquotes the position of Catholic theologians on the subject, and then proceeds to state, as fact, that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction. I guess the author figured that after Powell's speech — which he later repudiated — it would be a foregone conclusion.

We now know that the war was a foregone conclusion, and therefore, there was no need to entertain any serious doubts about Saddam Hussein's WMDs, because they were just a pretext.

Posted by Winston Smith at 11:04 PM | Comments (0)

NM-3Y: "Arrests of al-Qaeda Terrorists Disrupt Iraqi Attacks on U.S."

On February 3rd, 2003, the Moonie-run Washington Times wrote a front-page article entitled "Arrests of Al Qaeda Terrorists Disrupt Plans for Massive Attack." According to reporter, Bill Gertz:

Al Qaeda is planning a mass-casualty attack to rival September 11, but preparations have been disrupted by arrests of terrorists during the past several months, according to U.S. intelligence officials.

The article goes on to cite vague statements by the usual array of anonymous "intelligence sources":

"The attack will be large-scale," one official said.

Additionally, the intelligence reports stated that any major attack is likely to be preceded by smaller-scale strikes, including assassinations of prominent people in the United States, the official said.

Ooh. Scary.

Say, do any of you remember any of these things happening? No? How about anyone being arrested for plotting or attempting any of these things. None? Hmmm. Well, maybe Al Qaeda is only just now finishing their preparations since Osama bin Laden — who hasn't been arrested — supposedly just issued a rather brazen threat.

In any case, the Washington Times — tireless Bush Administration cheering section that it is — went on to elaborate on how well the war on terror was going. You'll find a lot of crap in Gertz's article, if you care to look it up. What you won't find in it is the word, "Iraq." Why is this significant?

Well, three years ago today (well, yesterday — I fell behind), NewsMax Magazine's online edition published some startling news: Arrests of al-Qaeda Terrorists Disrupt Iraqi Attacks on U.S. .

Um. What?

So, does the article link arrested Al Qaeda terrorists with Iraqi plots? Yes it does: right in the title. Isn't that enough? The body of the article begins with this:

Plans for a mass terrorist attack have reportedly been disrupted through the arrest of terror suspects, and U.S. officials plan to subvert other such threats by detaining suspected Iraqi agents should a war in Iraq begin.

Two newspapers today reported the anti-terror moves. Al-Qaeda plans a series of smaller assaults, including assassination of political figures, before launching a large-scale attack, the Washington Times said. The Washington Post reported that the CIA and foreign intelligence agencies were tracking suspected Iraqi agents and planned to forestall any retaliatory acts should the United States go to war with Iraq.

OK, we've already looked at the Times article, it mentions nothing about Iraq. The Post article? It's about tracking Iraqi agents as a defensive measure. How are these two articles linked?

The are only linked in the title of NewsMax article, and therefore, the tiny mind of every NewsMax reader. Undoubtedly, mentally-challenged war supporters all over the Internet linked to that article to combat war opponents who questioned the link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. There's your link, liberal!

Did it matter that the article itself doesn't really draw a meaningful connection? No. Three years ago, nothing mattered. We were going to war with Iraq regardless of anything anyone had to say. This article implies that Al Qaeda was linked with Iraq, but really says nothing to back that up, and that, my friends, was the level of discourse that war opponents have been offering since then.

In regards to the link between Al Qaeda and Iraq, I'll quote Saddam Hussein himself, from an interview published in the same issue:

If we had a relationship with al Qaida and we believed in that relationship, we wouldn't be ashamed to admit it. Therefore, I would like to tell you directly and also through you to anyone who is interested to know that we have no relationship with al Qaida.

Most of what Saddam Hussein says in the interview is true. Of course, if NewsMax readers cared about the truth, NewsMax wouldn't have left it on the site.

Posted by Winston Smith at 10:53 PM | Comments (0)

February 03, 2006

NM-3Y: "Iraq: The Last Republican Hurrah"

Three years ago today, online right-wing tabloid NewsMax magazine published an that article begs the question, "Why the hell did NewsMax, of all publications, publish this?" The article is Iraq: The Last Republican Hurrah and its main premise is that if the US military doesn’t find WMDs in Iraq, the Republicans are going to suffer from a terrible backlash.

Yes, that was in NewsMax.

The article also bitches about their lenient "anti-white" immigration policy, which certainly makes it fit in the NewsMax setting, but how did the loyal Bushies who take NewsMax seriously miss this stuff:

An invasion of Iraq is likely the most thoughtless action in modern history. It has the support of only two overlapping small groups: neoconservatives infused with the spirit of 18th-century French Jacobins who want to impose American "exceptionalism" on the rest of the world, and foreign policy advisers who believe that the primary aim of U.S. foreign policy is to make the Middle East safe for Israel.

No one else sees the point of the pending conflict. Abroad there is no meaningful support. Nuclear powers Russia and China are in opposition, as are NATO allies Germany and France. The Bush administration is reduced to boasting of support from Hungary and Poland.

What is the invasion all about? The administration’s answer strains credulity: Iraq has weapons of mass destruction that threaten the U.S.

These weapons are yet to be discovered by the U.N. inspectors who are combing the country. The paucity of evidence caused the Bush administration to declare a few empty artillery shells found in a bombed-out bunker to be the evidence necessary to launch an invasion.
The backup excuse is that Saddam Hussein is a bad man. No doubt he is a brute, but any secular ruler who has to sit on three separate groups (Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds) ready to split Iraq apart, is likely to resort to harsh measures.

With or without casualties, U.S. military forces can overthrow Saddam Hussein. But what comes next? What government takes over? How does that government remain in power? How do we get out?

OK, we probably lost the Freepers at "Jacobins," but what does hindsight tell us about what this author says? All of his observations were accurate and his concerns valid; and they were all assiduously ignored by the NewsMax faithful. Still, what about these predictions:

An American invasion of Iraq can succeed easily, but the aftermath can go terribly wrong. When it does, Democrats will hold the neoconservatives and the Republicans responsible. The same media that are helping Bush whip up war against Iraq will help Democrats whip up war against Bush.

The first one is true, the second, not true. The media continued to stumble along in a stupor of complicity with Bush talking points. A year later, when U.S. weapons inspector David Kay said that the claims about WMD were "dead wrong," NewsMax promptly began broadcasting the "new messages" which were:

• Everyone thought Saddam Hussein had WMDs.


• There was no political pressure on agencies to "cook" the intelligence to say there were WMD.


• And let’s not forget vague references to "proof" that was 10 years out of date, and the hilarious "WMD related program activities" that were supposedly rampant in Iraq.

On February 3, 2004, NewsMax carried two articles, WMD Estimates Wrong?, and the even more delusional Kay Vindicates Bush. The latter article — claiming that David “Dead Wrong” Kay vindicated Bush — could only have come from someone related to Rush Limbaugh, in this case, David Limbaugh.

How about a year later? Well, the Democrats were finally beginning to make some noise, as reported in Democrats Hit Bush on Iraq, Soc. Security:

Congressional Democrats hit President Bush on Wednesday for his Iraq policies and planned Social Security overhaul, hoping a vigorous response to his State of the Union speech will fuel a turnabout from their election setbacks last fall.

So, two years after an article in NewsMax predicted that Bush would fail in Iraq, and that the Democrats would call him on the carpet for it, NewsMax reports that very thing — in the context of partisan electioneering. This cleverly links criticism of Bush to pro-Democrat leanings, stigmatizing Republicans who might call for a change within their own party.

Also on that day, February 3, 2005, two Marines were killed. Today, I believe, we lost five more.

Posted by Winston Smith at 05:28 PM | Comments (1)

Justice Delayed

Scooter Libby's trial date has been set ... two months after the general election in November. "Justice delayed ... is justice denied" as the old saying goes, but this doesn't refer to Scooter. Rather, the U.S. is being punished by letting this miscreant and traitor remain free on bond while the truth is delayed until it cannot do damage to the GOP.

District Judge Reggie B. Walton said jury selection will begin on Jan. 8, 2007. Judge Walton said that he had hoped the trial could begin next September, but that Mr. Libby's lawyer, Theodore V. Wells Jr., will be tied up with another case. Republicans are likely to be pleased that the trial will be held after the Congressional elections.

Yes, that's right. His trial is delayed because it's inconvenient for this lawyers to hold it sooner. Oh, I'm sorry! We're oh so upset we put Mr. Libby in such an awkward spot. Maybe he can ask the judge to drop the charges as he claims he's innocent and thus a trial is almost certainly going to cause his distress! Vapors, even!

What the FUCK is going on here? Why does Libby's defense team get to set the date? Oh, maybe because of the heavy rollers funding his defense.

Meanwhile, efforts to raise money for Mr. Libby's defense are moving ahead briskly. Mr. Libby has pleaded not guilty to five charges of perjury and obstruction of justice in connection with the exposure of a C.I.A. operative's identity.

But the managers of the fund-raising effort on behalf of Mr. Libby say they have already reached the $2 million mark and expect to increase the pace when they start a fund-raising Web site. "It's a particularly excellent start," said Mel Sembler, the chairman of the Scooter Libby Legal Defense Trust.

Mr. Sembler, a Florida developer who is the former finance chairman of the state's Republican Party and the Republican National Committee, said Mr. Libby's lawyers had estimated that a solid defense would cost at least $5 million or $6 million.

The fund is not obliged under the law to disclose any details, including the number of donors, their identities or the amounts given. Barbara Comstock, a Republican communications strategist and an official of the fund, declined to disclose any of those details, except to say that there had been "hundreds of individuals."

Mr. Sembler said that there was a practical limitation in that federal law requires that taxes be paid on any gifts over $11,000 given in 2005 and over $12,000 this year. He said several donations had been made in those amounts.

The fund's steering committee is composed of several prominent Republicans, a few Democrats and several friends of Mr. Libby. It includes three former Republican senators, Fred Thompson of Tennessee, Alan K. Simpson of Wyoming and Spencer Abraham of Michigan; two former Republican presidential candidates, Jack F. Kemp and Steve Forbes; and Prof. Bernard Lewis of Princeton and Prof. Francis Fukuyama of Johns Hopkins.

And justice for all. In a pig's eye. This man should be hanged for damaging the U.S. and instead he's collecting $12K donations from the powerful. Tell me that's the patriotic thing to do, I dare you.

Posted by Steven at 11:02 AM | Comments (0)

February 02, 2006

NM-3Y: "Trap Set for Powell at U.N. Speech"

Welcome to the first installment of what I hope will be a daily feature, "NM-3Y." This stands for "NewsMax Minus 3 Years."

NewsMax is one of the "news" outlets set up by Richard Mellon Scaife during the Clinton years, to serve as an outlet for slanted news coverage. If a right-winger backs up his or her claim with a link to "newsmax.com," you can pretty much assume the claim is bullshit. I'm not saying that NewsMax lies. In fact, their articles can be surprisingly factual.

Today, we look at Trap Set for Powell at U.N. Speech.

When Secretary of State Colin Powell arrives at the U.N. Security Council on Wednesday to present new evidence on Iraqi weapons violations, he may get more than he bargained for.

Diplomatic sources tell NewsMax that Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz may come to the meeting to personally challenge the Powell presentation.

If you have the infantile brain of the average Freeper, this is as far as you read. This told you all you wanted to hear: "old Europe" and other terrorist allies will roll out the red carpet for Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz to attend Colin Powell's dog and pony show in front of the U.N. Security Council — spoiling it for everyone, no doubt.

The article provides further detail about the possibility that Tariq Aziz would attend, but there's a lot more. Here's one rather revealing tidbit:

Nobody (including U.S./U.N. Ambassador John Negroponte) raised any objections.

OK, so basically, this line, which is early in the article essentially admits that no one really cares whether Tariq Aziz attends. Not really much of a trap, now is it? Also, the article makes it clear that Tariq Aziz hasn't made a firm decision to attend, so what's up with the title?

Well, the title is what NewsMax wanted the Freepers to be talking about three years ago. What NewsMax didn't want them to talk about was stuff like this:

[Iraqi U.N. Ambassador] Aldouri, who just returned from an extended "homeleave" in Baghdad does not think the Powell presentation will change any minds:

"The decision (for war) has already been made by the United States. Now, they are they just trying to justify it," Aldouri told NewsMax.

Syria's ambassador Mikhail Wehbe says Damascus has seen nothing yet from Washington that has provided justification for a military campaign.
...

The director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei speaking in New York City, said his agency has yet to uncover any evidence that Baghdad has resumed atomic weapons research or production.

As we know now, the Bush Administration was claiming that they knew Iraq was pursuing banned weapons programs. In his upcoming speech, Powell would show satellite imagery purporting to show the specific sites. What Powell was after was an authorization to use force to search those sites because Iraq wouldn't give us access. Right?

Last month, Aziz said that Baghdad would allow Washington to send its own arms inspectors to Iraq to search for hidden weapons.

The White House ignored the offer.

Oh.

Remember, the mantra now is that "everyone in the world thought Saddam Hussein had WMDs." The mantra then was that "we don't want to invade Iraq, and we will try anything to avoid it." Lies. Lies, lies, lies yeah-ah.

The fact is that the White House had pre-determined to invade Iraq and didn't really care whether it found WMDs or not. This isn't a revalation that required reading the information on After Downing Street, it would have been obvious to anyone reading NewsMax for fuck's sake.

Well, anyone with a working brain.

There was nothing false in the NewsMax article, but what truth it did contain was cradled in the theme that the U.S. was a beleaguered underdog in its noble cause against Saddam Hussein, and was beset at every turn with lies and indifference. To wit, the closer:

The looming prospect of a Powell-Aziz confrontation has some Council diplomats talking:

"It could become quite dramatic," explained one ambassador.

That may prove to be the understatement of the month.

So what, in this article was informative? The allegation that Bush was bullshitting about the WMDs and was going to war regardless of any opposition, or even reason itself.

What about the "topic" of this article? Nothing came of it. (This is typical for NewsMax articles.) I can't recall if Tariq Aziz attended the session or not, but if he did, he sat in stony silence with the rest of the delegates.

Posted by Winston Smith at 06:06 PM | Comments (0)

Follow The Money

As a regular scanner of Free Republic, I was witness to their "Q1 Freepathon" in which they asked for $66,000 in donations to keep their political cesspool all gooey with crypto-fascist badness. I see this once a quarter, but this time it was different. This time, it took a while to reach the goal. In addition, a persistent link to "Donate to FR" was added in the page header.

In a related story, MoveOn.org sent out an email yesterday seeking to raise $250,000 to help fund their upcoming efforts. Their hope was to raise this by the "end of the end of tommorow" — which would be today, a Thursday — although it was a weekly goal. By the end of the day, they had raised $389,900 from people giving an average of $60 a piece.

This morning, they send out another email challenging MoveOn.org members to hit a new target of $600,000 by the end of tomorrow (Friday). By the close of business Thursday, MoveOn.org had collected a total of $646,648. So, the new goal is $750,000 by the end of Friday, three times what they'd hoped to get this week.

Folks, George Soros and George Clooney are not responsible for these sums. These collections are averaging about $60 a person. Some people give $100, some less, probably a few are giving more. These are fed-up Americans like me — and probably you — who want to see some real change in Washington. Meanwhile, the Freepers can barely get $66,000 in a two-week in-your-face "Freepathon."

This is huge. This is the sign that it's no longer us die-hard dissidents opposing the madness of King George, it is the nation at large. The grass roots are sprouting.

Help fertilize them.

UPDATE:
MoveOn.org sent out an email this morning with the following tallies:

Total Donors: 15,054
Funds Raised: $922,14