Lying sack of weasel feces: Kate McMillan edition.

Holy. Fucking. Shit. There's misrepresentation, and then there's just flat-out, bald-faced, rancid bullshit (emphasis tail-waggingly added):

I Hope You're Sitting Down

"A War We Just Might Win"

VIEWED from Iraq, where we just spent eight days meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel, the political debate in Washington is surreal. The Bush administration has over four years lost essentially all credibility. Yet now the administration’s critics, in part as a result, seem unaware of the significant changes taking place.

Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.

After the furnace-like heat, the first thing you notice when you land in Baghdad is the morale of our troops. In previous trips to Iraq we often found American troops angry and frustrated — many sensed they had the wrong strategy, were using the wrong tactics and were risking their lives in pursuit of an approach that could not work.

Today, morale is high. The soldiers and marines told us they feel that they now have a superb commander in Gen. David Petraeus; they are confident in his strategy, they see real results, and they feel now they have the numbers needed to make a real difference.

That was from the New York Times.

Why, yes, Kate, it was ... so let's see whose work it was, shall we?

A War We Just Might Win

By MICHAEL E. O’HANLON and KENNETH M. POLLACK
Published: July 30, 2007

Yeah, that would be this Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack:

“As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily ‘victory’ but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with,” O’Hanlon and Pollack wrote in an article entitled “A War We Just Might Win.”

Yet the authors – and the New York Times – failed to tell readers the full story about these supposed skeptics: far from grizzled peaceniks, O’Hanlon and Pollack have been longtime cheerleaders for a larger U.S. military occupying force in Iraq.

Indeed, Pollack, a former CIA analyst, was a leading advocate for invading Iraq in the first place. He published The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq in September 2002, just as the Bush administration was gearing up its marketing push for going to war.

British journalist Robert Fisk called Pollack’s book the “most meretricious contribution to this utterly fraudulent [war] ‘debate’ in the United States.” (Meretricious, by the way, refers to something that is based on pretense, deception or insincerity.)

And things in Iraq getting so much better? Eh ... not so much:

U.S. drops Baghdad electricity reports
The daily length of time that residents have power has dropped. The figure is considered a key indicator of quality of life.

WASHINGTON -- As the Bush administration struggles to convince lawmakers that its Iraq war strategy is working, it has stopped reporting to Congress a key quality-of-life indicator in Baghdad: how long the power stays on.

Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week that Baghdad residents could count on only "an hour or two a day" of electricity. That's down from an average of five to six hours a day earlier this year.

Honestly, Kate, why don't you just copy and paste directly from Matt Drudge or Michelle Malkin or Michael Yon, and stop even pretending to have an original thought? As a blogger, you're a dishonest, neo-con bottom dweller that's an embarrassment to the species. As a simple stenographer, though, you're not bad. So if I were you, I'd just go with your strength. It's a lot easier, and your adoring minions certainly won't think less of you. They're all idiots, anyway.

YOUR CC HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT: I just know there are an increasing number of blog articles that tear both O'Hanlon and Pollack a couple new orifices for that inane op-ed piece. If you run across particularly good ones, leave the URLs in the comments section, and I'll start collecting them up here. I'll start things off, 'cuz that's just the kind of guy I am:

• Greg Sargent, Talking Points Memo


• Glenn Greenwald (a definite must read)


• Think Progress

IT'S JUST DEPRESSING. Seriously, it's breathtaking to witness the collective lunatic dementia in the comments section at Kate's place. Like this one:

I have to respect O'Hanlan and Pollack becauase they seem to be two of the very few people who write or simply spount off about Iraq who do not manifestly suffer from severe confirmation bias of pre-existing political agendas. They actually went back to Iraq, did a comparative analysis of earlier work and came to a starkly different conclusion. A rare feat these days; one that in itself lends substantial credibility to their report.

Posted by: murray at July 30, 2007 7:43 PM

How do you even begin to respond to such inane blather? Better yet, why would you even try? Best to leave "murray" gazing up at the chartreuse-coloured sky on his planet. He seems so blissfully happy, it would be a shame to disturb him.