THIS MODERN WORLD

From Molly Ivins:

Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, unprecedented presidential powers, unmatched incompetence, unparalleled corruption, unwarranted eavesdropping, Katrina, Enron, Halliburton, global warming, Cheney’s secret energy task force, record oil company profits, $3 gasoline, FEMA, the Supreme Court, Diebold, Florida in 2000, Ohio in 2004, Terri Schiavo, stem cell research, golden parachutes, shrunken pensions, unavailable and expensive health care, habeas corpus, no weapons of mass destruction, sacrificed soldiers and Iraqi civilians, wasted billions, Taliban resurgence, expiration of the assault weapons ban, North Korea, Iran, intelligent design, swift boat hit squads, and on and on.

It looks like the Republican dirty tricks machine has been in full force over the weekend sending fraudulent robocalls to voters in multiple states. Here’s the details from Talking Points Memo (who’s actively tracking the story) :

What we’re talking about is something a bit different. What we’re seeing is an apparent coordinated effort from the NRCC — the House GOP committee — to place calls that appear to be from the local Democratic candidate and then automatically call the same number back as many as seven or eight times each time the caller hang-ups. If the caller listens to the whole message it goes on to bash the Democratic candidate. But if the caller hangs up prematurely, the computer calls right back. Hang-ups are the achilles heal of robo-calls. So this seems to be an attempt to cover for that weakness by making those who hang up think the Democratic candidate is basically harassing them with phone calls. The GOP wins either way.

What is there to do about it. As described, the calls appear to be in violation of federal regulations which mandate that these calls clearly identify their origin. The repetitive call back may also be a violation in different states. The New Hampshire AG apparently just intervened to force the NRCC to stop the calls in that state. But frankly, none of that matters. Because the folks placing the calls factor in the price of whatever fines might be meted out after the election when the damage is already done.

This is exactly the sort of thing we should expect from the party of big business. Our nation’s laws mean nothing to these creeps. To them, the fines they’ll probably end up paying for this criminal activity are nothing more than another line item on the campaign’s expense report. Dispensing a few grand to pay the fines for committing electoral fraud won’t phase them any more than paying campaign staff or buying ad time would. Thousands of dollars in legal fees and fines will be money well spent if they get to keep controlling the government.

This sickening disregard for our laws is indicative of everything these scumbags stand for. With the Abramoff scandal, the GOP was embroiled in a patronage and bribery operation that has tentacles into almost every facet of the right wing machine. For the Bush Administration, American birthrights like habeas corpus, due process, and checks and balances have been thrown aside in an attempt to consolidate power. And now these latest Republican dirty tricks which echo their earlier attempts to hijack democracy such as the New Hampshire phone jamming case, Tom Delay laundering corporate campaign money through his political action committee, and voter suppression efforts aimed at minorities in Florida, Ohio, and elsewhere. These robocalls aren’t an isolated incident, they’re the instinctual behavior of a party that will break any law that stands between them and their lust for power and money.

This latest attempt by the GOP to subvert our democratic process makes me ill. That our nation’s predominant political party would lie, cheat, and steal to stay in power should stun and sadden every citizen. This isn’t just unethical, it’s un-American. As a democracy that strives towards an open and honest debate of ideas, the fraud and deception of the Republican party is antithetical to our core values. The Republican party should be ashamed of themselves. We all deserve better.

Michael Ledeen, prominent conservative “expert” on terrorism, is perhaps the craziest person in America who’s not institutionalized. For instance, here’s a new claim of his in National Review:

I do not feel “remorseful,” since I had and have no involvement with our Iraq policy. I opposed the military invasion of Iraq before it took place and I advocated—as I still do—support for political revolution in Iran as the logical and necessary first step in the war against the terror masters.

Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn Ledeen’s lying.

Big news!

Saddam Hussein Is Sentenced to Death

An Iraqi special tribunal today convicted Saddam Hussein of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to death by hanging…

As you’d expect in an industry devoted to bringing crucial information to as wide an audience as possible, out of the thousands of English-language stories on the verdict, only one (from the United Arab Emirates), has bothered mentioning this:

Saddam was seen by U.S. intelligence services as a bulwark of anti-communism and they used him as their instrument for more than 40 years, according to former U.S. intelligence diplomats and intelligence officials…his first contacts with U.S. officials date back to 1959, when he was part of a CIA-authorized six-man squad tasked with assassinating then Iraqi Prime Minister Gen. Abd al-Karim Qasim…

Saddam, while only in his early 20s, became a part of a U.S. plot to get rid of Qasim…

The assassination was set for Oct. 7, 1959, but it was completely botched…Saddam, whose calf had been grazed by a fellow would-be assassin, escaped to Tikrit, thanks to CIA and Egyptian intelligence agents…

Saddam then crossed into Syria and was transferred by Egyptian intelligence agents to Beirut, according to Darwish and former senior CIA officials. While Saddam was in Beirut, the CIA paid for Saddam’s apartment and put him through a brief training course, former CIA officials said. The agency then helped him get to Cairo, they said…

In Cairo, Saddam was installed in an apartment in the upper class neighborhood of Dukki and spent his time playing dominos in the Indiana Café, watched over by CIA and Egyptian intelligence operatives…during this time Saddam was making frequent visits to the American Embassy…

In February 1963 Qasim was killed in a Baath Party coup…the agency quickly moved into action. Noting that the Baath Party was hunting down Iraq’s communist, the CIA provided the submachine gun-toting Iraqi National Guardsmen with lists of suspected communists who were then jailed, interrogated, and summarily gunned down…the mass killings, presided over by Saddam, took place at Qasr al-Nehayat, literally, the Palace of the End…

The CIA/Defense Intelligence Agency relation with Saddam intensified after the start of the Iran-Iraq war in September of 1980. During the war, the CIA regularly sent a team to Saddam to deliver battlefield intelligence obtained from Saudi AWACS surveillance aircraft to aid the effectiveness of Iraq’s armed forces…the CIA and DIA provided military assistance to Saddam’s ferocious February 1988 assault on Iranian positions in the al-Fao peninsula by blinding Iranian radars for three days.

The Saddam-U.S. intelligence alliance of convenience came to an end at 2 a.m. Aug. 2, 1990, when 100,000 Iraqi troops, backed by 300 tanks, invaded its neighbor, Kuwait. America’s one-time ally had become its bitterest enemy.

This is of course how it should be, because all that matters in life is what’s happened within the last twelve seconds.

There are stupid people everywhere on earth. In most countries they quietly putter their lives away, trying to grow mangos in Nova Scotia and getting into occasional bar fights with people who tell them Jean-Luc Picard isn’t a real person.

What’s unique about 21st century America is that we have a gigantic industry devoted to finding these people and giving them jobs opining about politics. “Can’t tie your own shoes?” read the want ads. “Believe two plus two equals nine, and willing to say so in public? Apply today for a career in the Right Wing Media!”

Thus there are dozens, hundreds, thousands of these cretins toiling away in the subsidized vineyards, making their Idiot Wine. But I think we need to stop today and salute Jim Geraghty of National Review, who has produced perhaps the Stupidest Vintage ever.

Here’s why:

As we’ve known since the early nineties, Iraq got close to building a nuclear weapon before the 1991 Gulf War. The shortest estimates are that Iraq would have needed perhaps another year (without the sanctions imposed in August, 1990 after the invasion of Kuwait).

After the Gulf War, however, the Iraqi nuclear program was destroyed by the IAEA and never reconstituted. During this time the IAEA required Iraq to explain in detail exactly what their pre-91 nuclear program achieved. Copies of these documents were given to the U.N. on repeated occasions, including in fall, 2002. Before any were publicly released, sensitive information about weapon design, etc. was excised.

After our newest war huge numbers of Iraqi government documents were captured. America’s right pushed for them to be publicly released online. (They believed the documents would hold overlooked clues to Saddam’s Chamber of Secrets hiding his WMD and valentines from Osama.)

Now the New York Times has reported that the uncensored versions of the nuclear documents were accidentally included in the online release:

…the site has posted some documents that weapons experts say are a danger themselves: detailed accounts of Iraq’s secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The documents, the experts say, constitute a basic guide to building an atom bomb…

Among the dozens of documents in English were Iraqi reports written in the 1990s and in 2002 for United Nations inspectors in charge of making sure Iraq had abandoned its unconventional arms programs after the Persian Gulf war. Experts say that at the time, Mr. Hussein’s scientists were on the verge of building an atom bomb, as little as a year away.

Here’s where Jim Geraghty and his Brain The Size Of A Grain Of Rice come in. In a post at National Review, he asks:

I’m sorry, did the New York Times just put on the front page that IRAQ HAD A NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROGRAM AND WAS PLOTTING TO BUILD AN ATOMIC BOMB?

Wow, that’s AN EXCITING ALL-CAPS QUESTION.

Let’s give it AN EXCITING ALL-CAPS ANSWER:

NO.

What’s confused Mr. Grain of Rice Brain, of course, is the difference between what Iraq had done before the Gulf War in 1991 and twelve years later before the recent war.

Now, making this mistake is remarkably stupid to start with. Still, you can imagine that someone who knows nothing whatsoever about the subject could do so. Where Jim “My Brain Weighs Eight Milligrams” Geraghty really outdoes himself is going ahead and writing something about it. Because doing so required him to consider whether it was more likely that all these things were true —

1. The CIA spent $1 billion without finding any trace of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program.

2. The New York Times discovered Iraq actually had a nuclear weapons program a year away from a bomb and decided to reveal it in an ambiguously-worded sentence in paragraph 14 of a story about something else.

3. The Bush administration knows about this program and has modestly decided not to say anything about it.

— or whether it was more likely he’d misunderstood something. And then decide it was the former.

DEAR GOD IN HEAVEN THAT’S STUPID

Even better, he then takes the stupid foundation and builds a giant Mansion of Dumb on top of it. (Doesn’t this incredible revelation mean that Joe Wilson has been proven completely wrong?!???)

But again, we shouldn’t blame Mr. Geraghty. He’s doing the best he can with his three neurons. In other times and places he would have lived a happy, simple life, whiling away the hours trying to milk chickens. The responsibility truly lies with the owners of National Review, who’ve plucked him out of his natural habitat.

In other words, it’s the puppet-masters who matter, not the puppets. Although given Mr. Geraghty’s performance here, that analogy is an insult to the intelligence of puppets.

EXTRA BONUS STUPID: While Jim Geraghty is Patient Zero, the Idiot Virus has spread here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and surely millions of other places thanks to this.