"Hello?? Fly??"

Jesus Christ, I swear there's a well-organized cabal somewhere such that, whenever one inarticulate, badly-educated wingnut finally leaves this site, another one shows up to fill the hole. I'm imagining some kind of Willy Wanker and the Wanker Factory, churning these yahoos out by the score.

The latest contestant in the "How Dumb Can I Look On Someone Else's Blog?" sweepstakes is someone who goes by the nom de blog of "The Fly," and whose talent for critical thought is perhaps even worse than Pete Rempel's, as you can read in the comments section back here.

Rather than eviscerate fly's silliness from top to bottom (which has been done countless times by bloggers far better than I), I'm going to pick on a single sentence to demonstrate fly's lack of anything remotely resembling logic. Examine carefully the following sentence:

[Saddam] had pursued and used weapons of mass destruction.

Notice anything odd about that sentence? Why, yes, yes you do.

There's an awkward redundancy about that claim, isn't there? Why would you accuse someone of both "pursuing" and "using" WMDs? I mean, if you've already accused someone of using WMDs, additionally accusing them of pursuing same is kind of irrelevant, isn't it? After all, if you've used them, it kind of follows that you must have, in some way, pursued them, no? But if you've been following the ever-changing rationales for the invasion of Iraq, suddenly the awkward construction in that sentence makes a lot of sense.

See, in the beginning, the Bushies knew that Saddam had WMDs. Absolutely knew it, even knew just where they were.

When the WMDs annoyingly failed to turn themselves in (and Saddam never used any WMDs during the invasion), then it became a case of Saddam having an active program for WMD development (scroll to the bottom for some delightful Bill O'Reilly bashing). So, technically, he didn't have actual WMDs, per se, as it were, but he really, really, really wanted some, to the extent of trying to buy yellowcake from Niger. Or somewhere.

When even that accusation fell apart, the story finally morphed into that Saddam had a program to look into the possibility of perhaps considering thinking about pondering maybe the eventuality of developing a strategy to perhaps want to get himself some WMDs and if his neighbours had any lying around they weren't using, could they maybe give him a call or something? Which brings us back to the fly's drooling gibberish.

Now that sentence makes perfect sense since, well, you'd really like to accuse Saddam of "using" WMDs but, because there's absolutely zero evidence of that, you cleverly give yourself a back door and simultaneously accuse him of the more nebulous and ambiguous crime of "pursuing" them as well. That way, you can only be accused of half lying -- he didn't actually have any WMDs, but you can always claim that he "pursued" them, as long as you stretch the definition of "pursue" to include the notion of Saddam lying in a lounge chair, gazing wistfully into the distance and thinking, "Man, it sure would be nice if I had me some of those WMDs." See how that works?

And, being the intellectually stunted wanker that he is, Mr. Fly happily laps this stuff up off of FOX News or the Drudge Report or wherever he gets this crap. Oh, well. Whatever keeps you happy and deluded, I always say.

BY THE WAY, it's entertaining to read that anyone is still running with that "Saddam was a threat to the security of the United States" rubbish. Newshounds might recall how, just last year, the Bush administration was trying desperately to convince everyone that, hey, they never claimed that Saddam was an "urgent" or "imminent" or "immediate" threat to the U.S.

Happily, some folks have good memories.