Letters to the Editor
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It's The Lying, Stupid
"Could there really be any more than 1 or 2 percent of the population that believes WMDs *were* found in Iraq, but both Bush and the Democrats want this "fact" hidden to avoid embarrassment?"
I'm not sure about the Bush and the Dems hiding the fact part, but as recently as July of last year 50% of Americans still believed Iraq had WMD when we invaded. Think about that.
That is how successful Republican propaganda is. That is how dangerous this new conpsiracy theory is.
It's The Lying, Stupid. We have to make Republican lies a central focus of our attack on the Republican party. As long as they can lie and get away with it, they will never be stopped.
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Wolfowitz Mylroie Redux
Once again, it's down the rabbit hole.
From Sid Blumenthal's latest Salon article:
Wolfowitz's willful behavior, as though no rules bound him or facts constrained his ideas, should not have surprised anyone. At the Pentagon, Wolfowitz was an insistent force behind an invasion of Iraq, bringing it up at the first National Security Council meeting of the Bush administration, months before Sept. 11. For years he had been a firm believer in the crackpot theories of Laurie Mylroie, a neoconservative writer, who argued that Saddam was behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and even the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. After Sept. 11, Wolfowitz pursued his obsession by sending former CIA Director James Woolsey on a secret mission to attempt to confirm the theory. Woolsey came back with nothing, but Wolfowitz continued to believe. His beliefs are stronger than any evidence.
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Likewise
Slightly O/T here:
Their method of argument... is to never concede a point.
Agreed, although the same can be said about many on the left as well.
What bothers me the most is how they claim to cherish all parts of the Constitution, yet when anyone from the left decides to air a point on one of their blogs, they block the poster and often times delete the post. Happened to me on Red State recently - not that I expected anything different. It feels like they are saying "you got a problem with 2A, well we'll do you one better".
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Don't worry ...
Once he's done with the nukes and China, Jack Bauer will straighten this all out ....
It's all of the same psychological set ... no different than the belief in an omnipotent being that nobody has seen, which means it must be real. We'll just add "The Gospel of Gaubatz" to the pile ....
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They're really getting desperate to justify their failure
The "personal responsibility" crowd never fails to disappoint when it comes to taking personal responsibility for their own mistakes.
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I just skimmed the post...
And skipped the comments..
But when I have time I'll come back and read carefully because I think what we have here is an excellent dissection of conspiracy theories in general. This kind of thinking is of course reasonably common on both sides of the political spectrum which unfortunately makes it rather easy to discredit a lot of good ideas by associating them with particularly bad ones.
This is why it's vitally necessary that what we proudly refer to as the "reality-based community" continues to pound away.
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This kind of thing could put me out of a job.
I used to love writing satire. It's becoming a lot harder these days.
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Incredible
It amazes me (still!) what some people will consider credible. Is there even evidence that Gaubatz was in Iraq at all? His story seems to be that some guys drove him out into the desert and showed him something that they said was a WMD bunker. Perhaps Mr. Gaubatz would like to invest in some choice real estate I have? I have prime properties both in south Florida and in Brooklyn.
I can't quite understand why Ms. Phillips misses the obvious cause of "the collapse of traditional British identity", which was the decimalization of the currency. It's been all down hill since then.
But what can you expect from someone so gullible as to believe that transparent "they moved it to Syria" fable; any analyst worth their pay knows that's just a cover story concocted by Castro, who hired Elvis and the second shooter from Dealey Plaza to organize the transportation of the WMDs to their current location, Bat Boy's cave.
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Re: Update II
Ah yes, and remember Mr. Bolton is the same guy who said on the Daily Show some weeks ago that the President has an obligation only to "the people that voted for him."
Bolton is no dummy. And he's never been a small fish. These people are, quite literally, deluded by their pseudo-philosophies.
I say "pseudo-philosophies" because the more intelligent members of their movement often invoke a legitimate political concept in defense of their beliefs (in the above case, the political election of the president, who determines executive policy), yet always manage to bastardize that concept beyond recognition, into an inevitable strain of Machiavellianism.
And so, the American subspecies of authoritarian takes the rudimentary (and legitimate) principles of national defense, Chief Executive, political determination of policy, exigency, and self-preservation to distorted extremes. This allows them to assuage their consciences by reminding themselves, from time to time, that their concepts take distant root in otherwise valid concepts.
They cite beef and pork in defense of bologna, content to be full of exactly that.
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Before we invaded Iraq,
I was perfectly willing to believe Iraq had some sort of WMD program in effect. I never guessed that all those Administration claims were simply made up. What I said then and what I say now is "even if Iraq had a WMD program, it was not then nor had it ever been a threat to the US." Consequently, our belligerence was and is illegal, immoral and ineffective in the realpolitik sense.
Many nations in the world have WMDs. Many of those countries support terrorism. Many of those countries are our allies. But we don't make war on Pakistan.
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Centrifuges
To produce useful amounts of weapons grade uranium (U235) you need a cascade of thousands of centrifuges, each driven by a large electric motor. Such a facility cannot be hidden, even underground, because the electric power infrastructure is so large that it is easily identified by spy planes or satellites. For a country like Syria, not an industrial nation, the diesel generators and/or hydro power dams linked to the "secret" site rather than to cities would mean that ordinary citizens would be aware of the day and night operation of a huge industrial facility that consumed about a quarter of the national power capacity.
What kind of "intelligence" does this flake produce if thousands of people would be aware of the alleged centrifuge facility and its associated power infrastructure.