The Ugly Un-American: Morons and Oxymorons
Posted by Ray Church on 03.06.2007
"You thought there would be Weapons of Mass Destruction" you say. "You were misled" you say. Ray Church looks at why ignorance is no excuse on the issue of WMD's, plus defending Gore against Ryan Latimer, credit where it's due to Dan Martin and this week's Shut the Hell Up Award.
Boy, am I pissed off.
Normally I would put my main part of the article first, but this time, when our own 411mania staff are echoing the echo chamber, I have to get out what's on my mind. OK, the quick two-step. Here was the question from this week's fact or fiction.
There has been recent discoveries that the Oscar winning environmental guru and former Vice President Al Gore owns several homes - one of which is described as a mansion that uses upwards of 20 times the average American household uses - and regularly flies around in a private jet to spread his message of environmental responsibility. This proves Gore is a hypocrite, and it is arguable that this finding will damage the global warming crusade.
Now, I'll leave Radulich and Crow out of this, as they both answered it as "fiction", but here was the response from Ryan Latimer.
Gotta go with the Right Wingers on this particular one. Maybe I‘m totally off here, but there is something insanely irritating about someone who preaches for all of us to use less energy and then lives it up in a mammoth fuel-sucking home while doing so (Crow‘s Bush/Cheney point was valid, but consider that they are not on the crusade Gore is). Bear in mind this is coming from someone who supports Gore‘s point and cause, but I was a tad disappointed when I heard about this. I don‘t know, I‘m not here…
Ryan, I love you bro, but you screwed up here. As both Crow and Radulich pointed out, he's powering a mansion, but even that is beside the point.
You see, it's got nothing to do with how much energy you consume and everything to do with where that energy comes from. Think of it like your body. If you pump 10 pounds of McDonalds into your body, it's not the same as pumping 10 pounds of lettuce into your body. Somehow, someway, your body will pay for the fuel it uses.
Fact: The energy company, that powers that mansion that keeps getting mentioned, derive their power from non-polluting, totally renewable energy sources. Gore pays approximately 50% more for his power consumption because he chooses to use solar and wind power. So whether he consumes more power or not is irrelevant, because the power comes from an environmentally friendly source.
So, how did this little factoid fester in the public imagination? A right wing political hitjob delivered from a "non-partisan think tank" called the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, which, until the day of the announcement had literally no web traffic. It was manned by a young guy working for the American Enterprise Institute (not so partisan, really. Scroll down to the bit where it mentions funding). From there it somehow got picked up by the Drudge Report and then handed on to every right wing loon on TV.
Do your homework.
Facing the Question
And while I'm in a rage, let me get on to my topic.
If you haven't heard, David Geffen, former supporter of Bill Clinton, made comments openly critical of Hillary Clinton as a divisive figure. The laundry list was long, but one of the key arguments was her refusal to apologise for her Iraq Vote.
The repeated defense for Hillary Clinton has been that she was voting on the evidence she saw, and that most people saw.
Bullshit.
I'm sorry, but the last three years we have witnessed a rewriting of history so recent that not only were we there, some of us were awake. The modern line is that we all believed that Iraq had WMD's, so it's ok. We all made the same mistake. We all looked the same evidence and we were all mistaken.
Bullshit.
We were not all mistaken. Democrats deserve to be hammered for not voting against Bush on that call. The facts were there before, during and after the vote. Here's a game for you to play in your home state. Go to your local library and go to the periodicals. Look for magazines dated around late 2002 / early 2003.
Check out Newsweek, dated February 17 2003. There is a detailed breakdown of the argument Powell made to the United Nations. Ignore Powell's Case and read the "bottom line" for each piece of evidence.
Exhibit A: Transcripts of intercepted conversations between Iraqi soldiers show a clean up in progress.
Bottom line: "We don't know precisely what Iraq was moving" Powell admitted. The intercepts clearly refer to stray items, not big caches. And the Iraqis are disputing the English translations provided by the U.S. State Department.
Exhibit B: Reports from defectors of Mobile Biological Weapon factories. "Imagine trying to find 18 trucks among thousands and thousands that travel the roads of Iraq everyday".
Bottom Line: (Biowar experts) say truck mounted labs would be all but unworkable. The required ventilation systems would make them instantly recognizable… A routine highway accident could be catastrophic.
Exhibit C: A recording of a Republican Guard officer relaying orders to avoid using the term "nerve agents".
Bottom Line: Inspectors had already verified the destruction of almost all Iraqi chemical weapons and ingredients after Operation Desert Storm. By now any left over supplies would have degraded beyond use. (editorial note: these were found and, yes, they were degraded beyond use … U.N. Inspectors have found no evidence of toxic munitions at the alleged chemical-warfare facilities pinpointed by U.S. and British Intelligence
Exhibit D: Iraq has repeatedly tried to import equipment required for the construction of a nuclear bomb, including tubes for their delivery.
Bottom Line: U.N. experts say the tubes are "consistent" with Iraq's story and "not directly suitable" for a centrifuge. (Editorial note: and we now all know about the yellow cake in Niger)
Exhibit E: A missile test site with "an engine test stand… larger than anything it has ever had"
Bottom Line: "Abandoned".
Exhibit F: Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, "an associate and collaborator of Osama Bin Laden" who got medical care from Baghdad.
Bottom Line: Western intelligence has been unable to determine how close the ties are between Saddam and Zarqawi.
That's how I knew. That's probably how many others knew. If you read the rest of the text from the article, they make it sound like a slam dunk case, but if you read the evidence, it truly appears weak and muddied, and as we later find out, down right false.
So my response is this: make them all answer the question. If they voted for Iraq, hold their feet to the fire. If, like Edwards and many others have done, they admit they made a mistake and they let the world down, I have no problem. We all make mistakes.
But if, like Hillary Clinton, they refuse to admit they were wrong because they think it makes them look like they have balls (or "Thatchers, as Stephen Colbert put it), they should be held accountable.
The Morons and Oxymorons of Military Intelligence
So, after all that, you would hope we would have learnt by now that any claims the US government makes about terrorist threats and military intelligence should be taken with a grain of salt, but no. This week we also heard about the possibility of terrorist attacks from Iran in New York. In the subway. By staff of the Iraqi ambassador.
Very specific stuff.
The evidence, we find, is videos that embassy staff and similar people were taking of the New York subway. Now why on earth would they be taking video of the New York subway? It must be to plan a terrorist attack, right?
It couldn't be that the New York subway, as mundane as it may seem to New Yorkers, is actually quite a foreign concept to foreigners.
Nope, it's got to be a terrorist attack.
Compare this to the other people who have been arrested in America for supposedly plotting terrorist attacks. Take the Detroit Sleeper Cell who were accused of taking videos of Disneyland in an effort to launch a terrorist attack, when in fact they were taking videos of Disneyland because they were tourists and that's what tourists do.
And then there is the Buffalo Six, who actually had formal training in an Al Qaeda camp, no argument there, but the key piece of evidence used to prove that they were planning a terrorist attack was an email they received from a friend who said he was not going to be able to see them much anymore because he was going to get married. This was code, we were told, and the real reason he wasn't going to be able to see them anymore was because he was going to blow himself up.
In fact the real reason that he couldn't see them anymore was (wait for it)… he was going to get married. He would be a bit too busy.
You see when you chase invisible enemies, nothing is evidence of everything.
By now you would think that we had all tired of this paranoia. It turns out however, that it's been going on a lot longer than that.
Introducing Team B.
Never heard of them? Oh, but you have. One of the most prominent members of their group was Paul Wolfowitz, who went on to become one of the architects of the Iraq War. This was in the 1970's, when the Soviet Empire was collapsing and was so poor it had to buy wheat from it's arch enemy, the United States.
They were collapsing, but the USA needed a dancing partner for the 80's, so Team B was put in place to re-examine the evidence on Russia and come up with a worse case scenario. How effective were they? Well, ask Dr. Anne Cahn, member of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.
"I would say that all of it was fantasy... if you go through most of Team B's specific allegations about weapons systems, and you just examine them one by one, they were all wrong."
My favourite one was when they claimed that the reason they couldn't find any evidence of Acoustic Defense System for their submarines, so they decided they must have invented a non-Acoustic Defense System. Then there were the "laser beam weapons" that turned out to be radar systems.
The problem was not that Team B existed, but that they were listened to. And who listened to them? Well, the list included Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Richard Perle and, through their influence, Ronald Reagan. They played a game of "Weekend at Bernie's" with the Soviet Union, keeping the enemy alive just long enough to make Reagan a hero when he finally demanded that the Berlin War be torn down.
The Soviets, for example, had been negotiating (informally) to withdraw from Afghanistan since 1982. They wanted out. They would have left, too, except the US decided to aid the mujahideen.
Back to the point. Two major intelligence breakdowns: Near identical administrations.
Do you really think that it was a coincidence?
Shut the Hell Up Award
I know you all expect me to name Anne Coulter for the faggot award.
Nope. As ironic as it was (this was the same speech in which she wondered why homosexuals don't flock to the Republican Party, by the way).
I could name her for the comments about Barrack Obama as well. If you didn't watch it, she basically called out Obama on every part of his heritage. He was black, he was white, he Muslim… basically he was any number of ethnic stereotypes. And then she wondered why African American's don't come running to the Conservative Movement.
But to hell with Anne Coulter.
And is it just me, or is being endorsed by Anne Coulter the kiss of death for Mitt Romney.
I was also considering Glenn Beck, for what may be the sleaziest thing I've seen on TV. Watch Dina Sansing squirm, the poor lady. How on earth do you react to that?
But to hell with Glenn Beck as well.
And for the funniest thing on TV, watch Kerry finally get some revenge one of the guys who funded Swiftboat Veterans for Truth. An interesting side-note is that the guy's name is Sam Fox, also the name of a 80's singer / page three girl, and a search for him on youtube turns up some… (coughs) interesting hits.
No, our winner this week is Shinzo Abe, Prime Minister of Japan.
If you don't know the history, among Japan's many crimes during World War II was forced prostitution among countries and areas it had conquered. These women were known, in perfect Orwellian Language, as "Comfort Women".
This is what Shinzo Abe had to say about them.
There is no evidence to prove there was coercion, nothing to support it
The problem is that there is plenty of evidence for it. There are still "comfort women" alive today in Korea, China, Taiwan and the Philippines. The first thing that happened on the local news here in Macau was the interviews with women who had been forced to become comfort women in World War II.
It was truly uncomfortable to watch old ladies recount their stories, most in tears as they recall it.
A second Shut the Hell Up Award goes to Nariaki Nakayama, who explained it this way.
Where there's demand, business crops up, but to say women were forced by the Japanese military into service is off the mark. This issue must be reconsidered, based on truth, for the sake of Japanese honor.
You don't salvage Japanese honour by lying about what your country did 60 years ago. You salvage Japanese honour by admitting your ancestors acted like animals, and as civilized people you're sorry for that and remember that so you don't make the same mistakes.
And then you make sure it is written in your textbooks so your children don't make the same mistakes.
I Wish I Said That
I won't call this a new section until I start doing it weekly. I think the title speaks for itself.
This week, Dan Martin answering the question "Was there a news story that you feel was ignored this month?"
I think the news in Darfur along with the roughly 24,000 people that die of hunger every day around the globe are underreported. News agencies do not make a habit of exploring human misery unless it is somehow sensationalized. Also, the developed world needs to revise it's "never again" response to each and every genocide to read "never again until next time." The apathy surrounding preventable death and ethnic cleansing is undeniable
Here I was looking for something clever in the political field, when I missed the big picture. Thanks for reminding us, Dan, that America is not the only story.
The Section Formerly Known as Pimping
OK, two weeks to draw on here.
You probably didn't think that I would like this column Josh, but I actually agree with you. Good advice is to watch the documentary "Fog of War" and realize that war crimes are basically decided by the winner. That means committing genocide by gassing Jews methodically in gas chambers is a war crime. Committing genocide by deliberately bombing a wooden city with the full knowledge that it would create a firestorm and killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese, not a war crime. Ask the British what they thought of the Americans hiding in the forest like cowards.
Joe Rivett deals with Michelle Malkin, Anne Coulter, Barrack Obama and Hillary Clinton all in one column. And after Malkin, Coulter and Clinton I think he needs a shower.
The Big Bossman deals with Obama, McCain and Unions here and the political roundtable here.
Dan Martin takes a look at religion in office here
I was expecting to disagree with Mr. Radulich on this one, but it turns out there is a progressive side to the progressive conservative after all.
And, of course, check Crow and Radulich go at it here only to agree with each other and take on Ryan Latimer tag team style. But I'm sorry Crow, buying child porn makes him a criminal too.
STAY CURRENT