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For reasons that are currently a complete mystery to me, Canadian blogger Anonalogue comes up with a heck of a post detailing various Bush administration "lies."
Naturally, given the banter around this blog lately, it's a matter of debate whether something technically constitutes a "lie," so I'm specifically interested in any examples he describes in which Bush or any of the other flying monkeys in his administration profess absolute certainty about something that turns out later to be false. Recall that that was one of my definitions of a flat-out lie -- claiming certainty about stuff that just ain't so.
And there's certainly enough of that in Anonalogue's piece, like this (emphasis added):
Most of the misleading statements involve the selective use of intelligence or the failure to include essential qualifiers or caveats. For example, statements of certainty that Iraq was close to possessing nuclear weapons were misleading because they ignored significant doubts and disagreement in the U.S. intelligence community regarding whether Iraq was actively pursuing a nuclear program.
In 10 instances, however, the statements were false statements that directly contradicted facts known at the time by the Administration.
For example, on July 11, 2003, Ms. Rice stated with respect to the claim that Iraq was seeking uranium in Africa:
“Now, if there were doubts about the underlying intelligence . . . those doubts were not communicated to the President, to the Vice President, or to me.”
This statement is false because, as Ms. Rice’s deputy Stephen Hadley subsequently acknowledged, the CIA sent Ms. Rice and Mr. Hadley memos in October 2002 warning against the use of this claim.
I'm still reading A's post but there's certainly enough there to say with little fear of contradiction that yes, that smarmy little weasel Bush lied.
BY THE WAY, one of my favourite Bush administration lies was when they claimed they never said Iraq was an "imminent" threat. No, they say, they never used that word.
In the first place, they certainly used enough other synonymous words to leave no doubt as to what they meant. In their own words, Saddam and Iraq were "a threat," "a serious threat," "terrible threats," "a serious and mounting threat," "a real threat," "a unique and urgent threat," "a threat of unique urgency" and so on -- you can read it all for yourself. But, they are arguing, we never actually used that word so everything's fine.
Except they most certainly did use that word, didn't they, although sometimes only indirectly. Here's former spokesweasel Ari Fleischer, disagreeing with Helen Thomas:
Q There is no imminent threat.
MR. FLEISCHER: This is where -- Helen, if you were President you might view things differently. But you have your judgment and the President has others.
Q Why doesn't he prove it? Why don't you lay it out? When have they threatened in the last 12 years?
MR. FLEISCHER: They have attacked their neighbors. They have gassed their own people.
Q Twelve years ago.
MR. FLEISCHER: They have launched attacks.
There's no doubt that Fleischer is taking the position that Saddam's threat is imminent, since he's disagreeing with Thomas' contention that it isn't.
Other examples can be found here, where we also have White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett, being asked whether Saddam is an "imminent" threat and replying, "Well, of course he is." And there'e our own precious little pathological liar Scott McClellan who, back in 2003, spake thusly, "This is about imminent threat."
So, yeah, they lied. Trust me on this one.
P.P.S. And, no, this doesn't let Mr. Wudrick off the hook. I'm still not done with him.
Say hello to your new paradigm for news distribution.
Holy shit! As of right this instant, of the 42 articles over at OSM under the "World" news section, a full 33 of them are from the Xinhua News Agency. Apparently, all we have here in Pajama Wankers Media is a new American affiliate of Chinese communist news. Unbelievable.
Funnier and funnier: Again, as of right this instant, almost every story under Pajama Wankers' "United States News" section is a sports story. Apparently, nothing else is happening down south, except for Pajama Wankers ripping off everyone else's web content to report the latest scores.
And for this, they needed $3.5 mil in venture capital?
Finally deciding that I'll enforce a position I laid down a while back, I'm going to be deleting any further comments from one Jason/"Jinx McHue" on this blog, for the simple reason that he is a lying little turd who, when caught lying, refuses to 'fess up and just moves on to the next lie.
(If you really need to know the basis for this accusation, feel free to read about just one example here, where Jinx initially reported that troop new-enlistment rates were zipping along just peachy keen and then, when his source for that information issued a public retraction, Jinx never mentioned this to his adoring readership. And this is a guy who comes around, accusing me of dishonesty.)
Given Jinx's pathological dishonesty, I've decided that I'm not giving him a forum here anymore. He will, of course, scream about how I can't take the heat and how I'm scared to engage him in debate and other such rubbish -- this from someone who cavalierly deletes comments from dissenters at his own blog at the drop of a hat.
He will also, of course, accuse me of "censoring" him which is, of course, a nonsensical accusation. He has every right to say whatever he wants at his own blog, and more power to him. But I'm tired of him coming by here and dumping dishonest rubbish in my comments section. I'd rather he kept his dishonest swill over there, thank you very much.
It's not like I didn't give Jinx enough chances to come clean. I have, on many occasions, pointed out his illogic and his lies and asked him to correct the record, which he has never, ever done. And there comes a point where one just runs out of patience.
Bye bye, Jinx. Take your act elsewhere.
P.S. I will leave in place all of Jinx's comments that are already part of the historical record, but all new stuff is going bye bye.
This isn't so much a whole new beatdown as a logical extension of the last one, since I wanted to make one more observation of the logical idiocy of Mr. Wudrick's asinine analogy.
In debating whether or not one can technically accuse George Bush of "lying," Mr. Wudrick has the nerve to compare the claims of the existence of WMDs to discussing whether or not it's raining outside. This analogy is so stupid, it's not clear whether it's worth disemboweling but, what the hell, I'll do it anyway.
Mr. Wudrick presents his idea of an analogy that involves whether or not it's raining outside, without even considering the consequences of giving out false information. In the case of the rain, it's not hard to imagine that being told incorrectly that it's raining is rarely going to have dire consequences. At worst, in the scenario I presented, someone might waste several minutes rushing outside to roll up their windows, only to find out that's it's entirely unnecessary.
If that person comes back down to chew you out, you can truthfully tell them that you really did believe it was raining based on the information you had, and that you're sorry, and that should be the end of it. A little inconvenience but, all in all, no big deal, it's over, forget it and move on.
The consequences of getting claims of WMDs wrong are, on the other hand, a little more serious, aren't they? It doesn't really cut it to launch a military invasion of another country, destroy its infrastructure, saturate its land with depleted uranium and kill tens of thousands of its civilians, then have to sheepishly admit later, "Well, heh heh, about those WMDs? Um ... funny story ... seems we can't find them. But we really thought they were here. I mean, that Ahmad guy who told us about them, he had an honest face. Gee, shit happens, I guess."
No, sorry, that doesn't work. You don't get to bomb another country back into the Stone Age on bogus accusations, then excuse yourself later by saying, "Oops, my bad." Sadly, though, that's exactly what Mr. Wudrick seems to be saying.
Unfortunately, sometimes "sorry" just doesn't make up for things, does it? And no, we are still so not done with Mr. Wudrick.
(OK, I lied, I haven't left yet.)
OK, let us return to dissecting the illogical rantings of one Aaron Lee Wudrick, specifically this piece in which Mr. Wudrick demonstrates that he has no clue as to how logic or analogies actually work.
In debating whether one can legitimately accuse George W. Chimpster of technically "lying," Mr. Wudrick writes:
Let me see if I can analogize.
Yes, Mr. Wudrick, let's see if you can. (For those who can't handle suspense, the answer, sadly, is no.)
Mr. Wudrick analogizes thusly:
Let's say I'm in a sealed room with no windows, but information I receive from a reliable source convinces me that it's raining outside. I therefore insist to everyone that it's raining outside.
Once I get outside, I find it's not raining. Does that make me a liar? You might argue that it was, in the sense that something was represented as a truth that I didn't know for sure. But that's completely different than knowing what I was saying was definitely untrue. Naturally, folks like Cynic probably won't give Bush the benefit of the doubt: they don't trust him, so they're more likely to assume he knew all along. But to misrepresent a probability as a fact is a much lesser sin.
This analogy is so hopelessly inappropriate, it's hard to know where to begin, so let's take this one step at a time and work up to the actual solution.
First, let's go with Mr. Wudrick's sealed room idea and imagine that you work in a department, all of whose offices are several floors underground so that you have no direct exposure to the outdoors. Because of that, you really have no idea what the weather is like outside at any time.
You're working away one day when co-worker John, as he passes by, says, "Hey, how's it going, it's raining outside." OK, you think, you're not sure what possessed John to dump that brief weather report on you but you shrug your shoulders and get back to work.
Only moments later, co-worker Mary pops in, hands you some papers you've been waiting for and says, "I wonder if it's raining outside." Remembering what John just told you, you say, "Yes." "Shit!", exclaims Mary, "I left my car windows open!", and off she dashes to run up the several flights of stairs to the ground floor to get to the parking lot.
Minutes later, Mary is back looking a bit peeved. "It wasn't raining," she says in an annoyed tone of voice, "there's not a cloud in the sky. You lied to me." Did you? Personally, I don't think so.
In this situation, you happened to be passing along, in good faith, information you heard casually from what you would normally consider a reliable source. You weren't deliberately trying to mislead anyone, you were answering the question the most honest way you knew how. So I think we can all agree that, even though what you said was entirely incorrect, you certainly weren't "lying".
And why not? Because most of us equate "lying" with deliberately telling a falsehood -- saying something that we know isn't true which, in the above, lets you off the hook. But let's change the scenario just a little and see what happens.
Let's say that, just as John is telling you it's raining, Fred happens to be passing by, overhears this and says, "Raining? What do you mean? I was just outside and there's not a cloud in the sky." At this point, you have now been presented with two conflicting claims, neither of which you can verify for yourself so you have no way of knowing who's telling the truth.
Mary stops by later, asks the same question, you give the same answer, she dashes upstairs, comes back pissed off and accuses you of lying. Did you this time? Again, probably not since you still had no way of knowing what the weather was but, at the very least, if Mary finds out you were told two different stories, she can at least accuse you of acting irresponsibly. That is, you were told two different things and, when asked about it, you chose, for no reason whatsoever, to ignore one of them and go with the other. Technically, I still don't think it's "lying" but, at a minimum, it's irresponsible and misleading to not have acknowledged that you were in possession of alternate information. So let's push this further.
Same opening scenario but, this time, as Fred starts to say, "Raining? What do you mean? I was just outside and there's not ...," you savagely cut him off, holding your hands over your ears, singing, "LA LA LA LA, it's raining, that's what it's doing, not interested in hearing anything else, LA LA LA LA!!!" What does this situation represent?
Again, I think that, technically, when you later tell Mary that it's raining, you're still not "lying" but, this time, she really does have the right to be angry since, not only did you not factor in conflicting information, you absolutely even refused to hear it. You heard one story, you seized on that story and you were in no mood to even listen to an alternative scenario. At this point, you're being a real jackass but, in my opinion, still not a "liar." Which brings us to the last scenario.
Having been told, with no supporting evidence but based only on hearsay, that it's raining outside, you now start to tell people, "It's raining outside. There's no doubt about that, I can assure you with absolute and total certainty that it's raining."
Now you're lying.
And what's so different about this last scenario? The difference is that, given that there's no way you can know what the weather actually is, you insist on claiming that you have full knowledge of it, and that's the lie. You're not saying what you think the weather is, or what you believe the weather is, you're professing absolute certainty when you just don't have that certainty. And that, right there, is the lie. Are you with me so far? Because we're not done yet.
Let's say that someone calls you on your last claim. They know you've been working away for the last several hours and, because of that, there's no way you could know what the weather is, and they quite logically accuse you of lying.
"All right," you say, "let's all head upstairs and check it out." And off you go and, sure enough, when you get to the ground floor, it just happens to be raining. "See," you say, turning to your co-workers, "I've been vindicated."
No, you haven't. You still lied, for the simple reason that, when you made your claim, you had no way of knowing what the weather was. Once you lie like that, you can't be vindicated after the fact by lucking out. In short, once you lie, that lie can't be undone by lucky circumstances later.
Given that Mr. Wudrick is a law student, it might help to use a legal analogy here. Let's say you're an OPP officer and you pull over someone based solely on, say, their ethnicity, who was driving perfectly legally and safely, and do an unwarranted search of their vehicle and find, say, cocaine. The last time I looked, because there was no probable cause for the stop and the search, that person can't be charged with possession.
To compare this to the rain analogy above, you were wrong to stop and search that car, and finding drugs in it afterwards doesn't vindicate you, and it's painful to think I actually have to explain this to a law student but these things happen. Now, how does all this apply to Commander Chimpy?
Recall that George W. and his minions didn't just state that they believed that Saddam Hussein had WMDs. They didn't just say that they thought he had such weapons. No, they stated quite publicly that they had absolute, irrefutable, incontrovertible proof that Saddam had such weapons, even going so far as to say they knew where they were (emphasis added):
MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Finally, weapons of mass destruction. Key goal of the military campaign is finding those weapons of mass destruction. None have been found yet. There was a raid on the Answar Al-Islam Camp up in the north last night. A lot of people expected to find ricin there. None was found. How big of a problem is that? And is it curious to you that given how much control U.S. and coalition forces now have in the country, they haven't found any weapons of mass destruction?
SEC. RUMSFELD: Not at all. If you think -- let me take that, both pieces -- the area in the south and the west and the north that coalition forces control is substantial. It happens not to be the area where weapons of mass destruction were dispersed. We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.
This claim was, of course, total bullshit. It was also a lie, as I have explained above. But that's not even the best part.
As I have already explained, once you lie, that lie can't be vindicated after the fact by your being lucky. If you recall, after the U.S. troops had control of Iraq, they started looking for those elusive WMDs and kept coming up empty. At that point, it should have been obvious that the Bush administration lied. They claimed that they absolutely knew there were WMDs and where they were, and that was simply false. But they kept looking. Why?
Simple. They (incorrectly) believed that finding them after the fact would vindicate the lie. That is, of course, totally false, in the same way (Are you paying attention, Mr. Wudrick?) that stopping a car for no reason, searching it and finding drugs wouldn't vindicate the original, illegal stop. It doesn't work that way, Mr. Wudrick, and I really wouldn't want you to try that defense if you ever pass the bar. Trust me on that one.
So, in closing, yes, George lied. The instant he claimed to have absolute, unshakeable evidence of WMDs in Iraq, he lied.
And, no, we're still not done with Mr. Wudrick. His idiocy is almost endless but, as I said, I'm a patient man.
And in the haiku spirit of things:
Heading into town
I might post some while I'm there
But don't count on it.
Back within a day
Then it's back to writing snark
We're not done with this.
... beats the crap out of me. Despite having advertised that it would announce the winner at noon today, I still can't find any indication at the National Post's web site as to the winner. In fact, the voting page gives every indication that you can still vote, even though voting officially closed yesterday at noon.
Does it surprise anyone that the NP can screw up something as simple as an online poll? (Just say "no" and let's not make an issue out of this, OK?)
UPDATE: No, dear God, no, tell me that this teaser isn't saying that the public went with Don Cherry. Please, no ...
I swear, this blog has turned into a total dimwit magnet. How else to explain this snarky rebuttal to an earlier piece of mine? Mr. Tate writes:
Confirmed Case of Mad Lib
Canadian Cynic didn't like my last post contrasting real political persecution in North Korea with the American left's paranoid fantasy version.
Now, given that Mr. Tate has referred to me as a "Mad Lib" and follows that up with a suggestion of "paranoid fantasy," one assumes he's about to lay a thoroughly savage rhetorical beating on me and show me the error of my left-wing ways. Let us continue, then, as Mr. Tate writes:
His response is--recounting an Iraqi crime during the 1991 invasion of Kuwait that proved untrue. Which is of course completely irrelevant and demonstrates my point that there's little chance of engaging in rational discourse with the angry left.
Which is, of course, a wholly relevant story since it shows precisely how gullible are those on the Right when it comes to uncritically swallowing myths that just happen to reinforce their ideological rantings. The point of the Kuwaiti incubators story was to show how easy it was for those on the Right to accept total fiction, to the point of using it as supporting rationale for a military invasion. In what way is pointing out something like that not relevant?
But it's just a bit further down that Mr. Tate pulls the trigger and blows a hole in his own foot:
Perhaps the story is untrue. We may never know for certain.
Um ... exactly. Which is an admission I made numerous times in my piece, if anyone wants to get a copy of it and read it to Mr. Tate, who seems depressingly unable to read it for himself.
Of course these reports might be true. I never denied that. I was simply cautioning wanks like Mr. Tate that, given how hopelessly they'd been suckered in the past, perhaps it would be in their best interests to show at least a modicum of skepticism when stories like the North Korea ones pop up at such amazingly convenient times.
The best part of all of this is that, after describing me as a "Mad Lib" and implying some sort of "paranoid fantasy," Mr. Tate ends up agreeing precisely with the point I made -- that these reports might be true but we may never be sure, one way or the other.
It seems that, after starting out promising to lay into me, Mr. Tate travelled a long way to simply end up in the same place I started from. How amusing.
I don't mind wankers leaving dissenting comments on my precious blog. I do mind when those comments show a singular lack of anything remotely resembling critical thought or logical coherency. Back here in the comments section, we find newcomer "Awawiye," apparently (and mistakenly) impressed with his rhetorical skills when, after I make the sweeping generalization:
The Bush administration has, for years, argued that all of the evidence they received pointed to Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction.
Awawiye replied (thinking himself quite clever, I presume):
If that's true, you should have no problem finding citations covering "years" in which it was claimed that "all" the evidence etc. Waiting...
Let me explain how this works. With rabbits.
Imagine that I, making yet another universally-sweeping generalization, claim that all rabbits have two ears (accident-related incidents notwithstanding). Further imagine that wanker Awawiye disagress. How to best resolve this discrepancy? If I read him(?) correctly, Awawiye thinks that the burden of proof is on me to, somehow, produce evidence of my claim. But how exactly does he propose I do that?
Well, I could start bringing him rabbits -- dozens, hundreds, thousands of rabbits, all with two ears, but what good would that do? Regardless of the number of two-eared rabbits I produced, Awawiye could simply suggest that I haven't produced all of them, and that a non-two-eared rabbit is still out there somewhere. In short, it doesn't matter how much supporting evidence I produced, I could technically never prove my case.
On the other hand, there is a simple way to prove me wrong: Awawiye could simply show me a non-two-eared rabbit. That would be a clear and convincing counter-example to my claim, at which point I would have absolutely no choice but to retract it and admit I was wrong. Case closed, end of discussion.
See how that works? If Awawiye doesn't believe my claim, then it's his job to prove me wrong with a single counter-example. If I take the (perhaps unwise) position that every claim the Bush administration made with respect to Iraq's WMDs was that Iraq absolutely, positively, without any doubt had those WMDs, all Awawiye needs to do is produce a single statement from the administration in which they expressed some degree of caution or qualification about their claims.
Under the circumstances, then, it's Awawiye's job to disprove my claim. And if he can't, then he has no right to dispute it and he should shut the hell up. Well, Awawiye? I'm waiting ...
Well, with the collective brainpower behind this new wanker-based venture, you could pretty much have guessed that they would fuck things up right out of the starting gate. And did they ever.
It seems that their new choice for a name, "Open Source Media," already has a bit of a history. That is, it's already incorporated by someone else. Apparently, the geniuses over at Pajama Wankers never bothered to check that.
Follow the ongoing (and increasingly-legalistic) saga, in several parts:
It's more than a little amusing that a group of wanks who are planning to revolutionize news dissemination and propaganda distribution -- and who collected $3.5 million in venture capital to do just that -- weren't bright enough to not step on someone's else trademark.
If I was one of those venture capitalists, I'd be asking some pretty unhappy questions right about now.
FUNNIER AND FUNNIER: I really don't know what to make of the chaos over at Pajama Wankers. At their home page here, in the top box "At this moment...", there is sentence that begins "According to OSM News..."
If you follow the link under "OSM News", you get to ...TA DA! a "Pajamas Media" web page which still describes itself as part of the OSM family. Huh?
The best part though is that, at the end of that article talking about terrorists bombing a Jordanian wedding, you see the faint copyright line, "Copyright 2005 The Canadian Press. All rights reserved." So "OSM News" consists of ... ripping off other news organizations verbatim for their web site content.
Go on. Tell me you didn't see this coming.
BONUS SNARK: Pajama Wankers try (unsuccessfully) to explain the whole name thing here, where they attempt to direct readers to Lydon's "Open Source" site, and they can't even get that right, referring to Lydon's site with both a ".org" and a ".com" top-level domain suffix (the ".org" being the correct one).
And these morons plan on revolutionizing news distribution? They don't even understand URLs. Even worse, they seem unable to use a simple Internet query to determine the legal status of a given domain name, writing:
There are other Open Sources. A gentleman named Christopher Lydon has an excellent web site called Open Source. His URL is www.radioopensource.com, and he relinquished the domain name opensourcemedia.net.
Um ... he did no such thing, as a simple InterNIC query would have shown.
Wankers. Total wankers. And you're going to trust these idiots to bring you the news?
Well, since Weasel Boy can't take a hint and bugger off, we'll take a second to put his hypocritical inconsistency on display again. Over here, Jinx reproduces, without comment, an entire article about a man who was convicted of driving his van into an abortion center.
And being the "sanctity of life" kind of guy that he is, what was Jinx's take on this? Was he outraged? Was he sickened? Was he appalled and disgusted at this blatant disregard for life and the safety of other human beings? Um, no.
As you can read, Jinx's entire contribution to that piece was the title: "Not helping, pal."
Attaboy, Jinx. Like they always say, don't sweat the small stuff.
EXTRA SNARK AT NO EXTRA CHARGE: Our good friend Jinx over here:
From Wizbang:
Nominations for The 2005 Weblog Awards are now opened earlier this week. Nominations close November 26, 2005 (next Saturday), but don't put off nominating your favorite blogs - DO IT NOW!!!
I self-nominated (it's allowed) S&B for Best of the Top 1751 - 2500 Blogs ...
You nominated yourself? Good job, Jinx. So you have at least one fan, then.
There's a relevant scene from an old Law and Order episode (actually, I'm sure there's a scene from some L&O episode that's relevant for just about everything) in which ADA Jack McCoy is sitting in court when Det. Lenny Briscoe slides up quietly behind him and informs McCoy that one of the main characters of interest in the current case has just been found dead by the waterfront.
For reasons that will become obvious later in the episode, it's crucial that McCoy not know if the man died of foul play so McCoy, thinking quickly, instantly interrupts Briscoe and tells him he doesn't want to hear anymore -- he just shuts him down.
Later, in chambers, McCoy's argument before the judge rests entirely on the fact that he did not know before that moment that the man had died of a gunshot wound. Because McCoy had earlier, and quite deliberately, cut Briscoe off in mid-sentence, he can now say, with absolute sincerity, that he had no idea -- no idea whatsoever -- that the man had died of foul play. All he knew, he said, was that the man was found dead, that's all. And, in that respect, one could say that McCoy was being completely truthful about the whole matter, albeit in a technically sleazy way.
Which brings us back to one Aaron Lee Wudrick who argues that, if one wants accuse Bush of lying, well, gosh darn it, one should prove it. In fact, that might actually be a tall order if one takes the Jack McCoy approach.
The Bush administration has, for years, argued that all of the evidence they received pointed to Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction. If that were true, that would certainly let Bush off the hook since, if he truly and sincerely believed what he was saying, then of course he couldn't be accused of lying.
But it's becoming more and more obvious that there was plenty of dissenting evidence, just as it's becoming more and more obvious that any and all of that dissenting evidence was shunted aside and ignored in favour of even the flimsiest supporting proof of WMDs.
Now, it's one thing to be honestly mistaken, to realize that you looked at the evidence, examined it objectively and came to the wrong conclusion. It's quite another to have been presented with alternative evidence and sat there with your hands covering your ears, yelling, "LA LA LA LA, I can't heeeeeeear you, LA LA LA LA!!," which is precisely what the Bush administration did.
Under those circumstances, you really don't have recourse to the "Gee, we just didn't know" defense anymore. It's one thing to claim ignorance. It's another to remain wilfully ignorant -- to deliberately set out not to know certain things just so you can claim ignorance down the road. In legalese, unless I'm mistaken, this falls under the category of, "Well, yes, you might not have known where your friend was getting all that stereo equipment he was selling you at such a great price, but you certainly should have suspected that something wasn't right since there were no receipts and he only ever delivered it late at night, unloading it from the back of his car in the dark."
One would think that, being a law student, Wudrick might understand the distinction. I'm guessing this sort of thing comes up in a class he just hasn't taken yet.
More smackdown on tap later.
AFTERSNARK: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
And over here, we have AmericaBlog's John demonstrating that the word "lie" no longer has any real meaning. In talking about his star reporter Bob Woodward, who only recently admitted that he'd known about Valerie Plame's CIA status since 2003 and, in all that time, never admitted it but engaged in one of the most hideous conflicts of interest ever by bad-mouthing the investigation that whole time, Woodward's executive editor at the Post Leonard Downie Jr. says (emphasis added):
Bob Woodward never lied. He failed to come to me sooner and tell me something he should have told me. Once he did tell me last month, he told me everything about it. I've worked with Bob for 33 years, and he has always been truthful in person and in his work. He is also one of the most careful, accurate and fair journalists I have every worked with.
So Woodward never "lied." He just never let you, his executive editor, in on one of the most explosive political stories of the last decade. But that's not "lying," even as he publicly savaged that case's prosecutor and has now thoroughly embarrassed your entire newspaper. Jesus, this would be funny if it weren't so sad.
But he never "lied." And they tried to impeach Bill Clinton over semantics. Jesus Christ.
As a follow-up to the previous post, it occurs to me that, what with the deadline for voting for "Canada's Most Esteemed Public Intellectual" being noon tomorrow (Friday), there simply isn't time to have a protracted discussion as to who the progressive blogosphere should collectively vote for, so I'm just going to make that decision for you.
Dr. David Suzuki.
Yes, we could have a debate as to whether there is a more worthy recipient from the progressive point of view but we just don't have the time, and it galls me to think that someone like Charles Krauthammer or Barbara Amiel or Conrad Black or Mark Steyn or Don Cherry might win when Suzuki isn't even on the list of nominees. That's just idiocy.
So, between now and noon Friday, get your sorry ass over here and vote for Suzuki. Move it. Time's a wastin'. Tell your friends.
P.S. And if Scott Tribe is feeling generous, he might put a top-priority post up at PB.ca to make sure everyone's on board.
PAY ATTENTION, FOLKS: I know you all mean well but, just this once, let's listen to Uncle CC, shall we?
Given that it's less than 24 hours until the polls close, there's simply no time to banter about who might be a better choice than Suzuki. I openly admitted that there are others who might be more qualified but, with the time crunch, we don't have the time to argue about it.
In addition, almost everyone has at least heard of Suzuki, and his winning this would definitely give some level of heartburn to the Canadian right-wing blogogphere.
Finally, I see the humour in promoting someone totally unqualified (Mark over at Section 15 is suggesting Barbara Amiel) and, while that certainly has its humour quotient, someone like Amiel winning would just given Canadian wankers something to crow about. The irony would be, like, totally lost on them so you couldn't even make fun of it later -- they wouldn't get the joke.
Besides, if I really wanted to have fun with a write-in vote, I would have suggested Kate McMillan over at SDA. Or, for sheer perversity, Pete Rempel. But I'm going to stick with Suzuki. And you have less than 24 hours to do likewise. And if you have a blog, encourage your readers to do the same.
You want a haiku bitch slap? Here's your bitch slap, Zorph:
Jesus freakin' Christ,
How can someone be so dense?
And this guy's in LAW?
Thank you, thank you. I'm here until Thursday. Try the veal.
SHARE THE EXCITEMENT: All right, fine. Ms. Z, it's your turn.
BONUS HAIKU:
Zorpheous, you twit.
That first line of yours is wrong.
Can't you count to five?
Man, some people really don't have any standards.
Well, is this timely or what? We have the LA Times' new neo-con attack poodle and war cheerleader Jonah Goldberg, discussing whether or not George lied and, if he did, well, so what?
STOP ME IF YOU'VE heard this already. But there are people out there — honest, decent, sincere people and deranged moonbats, too — who think that George W. Bush lied about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. No, seriously, it's true. "Bush lied, people died" is one of their catchier slogans.
Given that Doughy couldn't get through the first paragrah of his first column without referring to "deranged moonbats," I think we have a pretty good idea that it's all downhill from here.
(Gee, someone else is annoyed with Doughy Pantload. Go figure.)
Is it possible that anyone over at the National Post is even remotely embarrassed about having power couple Conrad Black and Barbara Amiel on their voting list of "Canada's Most Esteemed Public Intellectuals," and at the same time having to put up with this:
Lord Black is indicted
Defiant couple keep up social appearances as the legal dominoes fall
Probably not. I'm pretty sure you don't normally find the phrases "National Post" and "shame" uttered in the same sentence.
BONUS TRACK: Whoops. Better not get too smug about this -- apparently, that would be in bad taste:
Arrest warrant out for Lord Black
I know the leftists are going to have a field day over this one.
Apparently, gloating over the misfortunes of your ideological opponents is suddenly a bad thing. Who knew?
I am in your debt. We must do beers some day.
Whassup? And no, we're not even remotely done kicking Mr. Wudrick's butt. Much more to come this weekend.
(And a good day to visitors from Ashley's bilgewater blog. If you have any intellectual respect for Mr. Tate, well, then you probably don't want to read this. But thanks for dropping by, anyway.)
From a recent submission to the comments section back here, we have "Ashley" from Georgia, standing there with this seriously peeved look on his face, arms akimbo, demanding to know why we on the Left would presume to speak of "crushing dissent" when everyone knows that only those on the Right have that privilege.
According to Ashley,
"Crushing dissent" is one of the nonsensical catch-phrases the angry left slings around rather freely these days when discussing the Bush administration. Attempting rational conversation with anyone who says such things is a rather futile pursuit and so I generally ignore them.
However, that same "nonsensical catch-phrase" is perfectly appropriate when wielded by those on the Right, as Ashley explains in detail here, apparently swallowing hook, line and sinker what might (and I emphasize might) very well be just an opportunistic urban legend. Ashley writes:
In 1996 North Korean soldiers building another empty highway for Kim Il Sung discovered a Bible and a list of 25 names while demolishing an empty house. Those on the list were identified as the members and leaders of a secret Christian church, which perhaps met in the house. Everyone on the list was immediately arrested at their workplaces and imprisoned...
You can read the rest, but let's pop over to the Sun, shall we, and see what it actually says (emphasis added):
Among the first-hand reports are eyewitness accounts of Christians' being executed for the underground practice of their faith.
The study recounts, for example, how in November 1996 in North Korea's South Pyongan province, a unit of the North Korean army was tasked with widening a highway connecting Pyongyang to a nearby port city. While demolishing a vacant house, soldiers found in the basement, hidden between two bricks, a Bible and a list of 25 names. Among the list were individuals identified as a Christian pastor, two assistant pastors, two elders, and 20 parishioners who were identified by their occupations...
Now, this may very well have happened, but I'm a little suspicious that, as I read it, all we have to go on are eyewitness accounts since (and how shall I put this diplomatically?) some of those on the Right have a bad habit of making shit up for sympathy's sake.
Recall, if you will, this myth of Iraqi soldiers, during the first Gulf War, taking Kuwaiti babies out of incubators and leaving them to die on the hospital room floor. Never happened but, as you can guess, it was great for the public relations value. (For various accounts, just Google on "kuwaiti babies incubators".)
Other parts of the North Korea story seem just a little ... well, odd. As recounted in the LA Times:
In a 1996 case, a tattered Bible and a notebook containing a list of names were discovered wedged between two bricks in the basement of a house that was about to be demolished to make way for a road expansion.
Five middle-aged men who were accused of running an illegal church were brought to an army compound. They were forced to lie on the ground and were crushed by a steamroller, said a 30-year-old North Korean defector, who added that he witnessed the incident while he was in the army.
In the first place, how is it that the Bible was so easily and accidentally discovered by a road crew? Was it that pathetically hidden? And what was with that list of names? If you live in a country in which Christian worship is punishable by death, doesn't it seem incredibly stupid to acquire a Bible, write down a list of local (secret) worshippers of the forbidden religion, then save the list with the Bible and hide that Bible so incompetently that it's eventually found? Were these people so dense that they had no idea that a highway was coming so that they could move the incriminating Bible elsewhere? (I mean, new highways don't just sneak up on people -- you can generally see them coming from a long way away, you know.)
Does any of this make sense? (And if you accuse me of being overly cynical and skeptical about such an obviously heart-wrenching story, I will respond with only one word: "Incubators.")
Perhaps the most annoying part of this story can be found in this passage:
Missionaries working along the border have tried creative means to get Bibles into North Korea: hiding them in sacks of rice or even floating them over the border with balloons.
Right. So ... Christians are mortified by the thought that simple possession of a forbidden Bible is enough to get one killed in North Korea, and their response is to ... do everything they can to get Bibles into the hands of those people. Does this strike anyone else as being somehow counter-productive and just a little stupid? Just asking.
AFTERSNARK: Stories like the North Korean one above are typically recounted to convince one that the teller is terribly, terribly concerned about religious persecution around the world.
This is bullshit.
These people are not concerned about religious persecution in general; they are concerned only with Christian persecution and they quite simply don't give a rat's behind about the persecution of anyone else.
If you need convincing, the next time you start hearing a tale of "religious" persecution, ask the teller if he or she can identify a single example, from anywhere in the world, of systematic religious persecution of a group that is not Christian, and watch the blank, confused look spread across their face.
The prosecution rests.
MAN, THIS STORY HAS LEGS: I guess the wankersphere has a whole new meme going on here as the National Post jumps in with both feet:
North Korea crushing churches
U.S. report: Commission tells of Christians executed in front of schoolchildren
U.S government report says North Korea is raising religious persecution to the same heights as ancient Rome.
While the Romans threw Christians to the lions for sport, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom says North Korea's leaders settle for snap trials followed by firing squads or simply crushing the heads of underground church leaders under a steamroller.
As I've already said, it's quite possible that these stories are true, but some of them are just setting off the faintest warning bells for yours truly. Like this one:
In another case, a woman told of being forced to witness the 1997 firing squad execution of a young woman and her father near where the Seong Cheon River runs into the Tumin River.
The young woman had been washing clothes by the river when she accidentally dropped a Bible she had hidden in her laundry.
After three months of interrogation, she and her father were put on trial in a marketplace, condemned as traitors and executed on the spot in front of an assembled crowd of schoolchildren and their teachers.
Accidentally dropped a Bible she had hidden in her laundry? That is so soap opera -- you know, like when exactly the wrong person walks into the room at exactly the wrong time to catch someone in a compromising position, or when someone picks up the phone at exactly the wrong instant to overhear the most incriminating conversation, or when someone opens, by accident, exactly the wrong piece of mis-addressed mail to learn that their wife is really their sister, or some such nonsense.
Did this actually happen? It's hard to say, but it sure makes for fine storytelling that someone just happens to be carrying around, in their laundry of all places, the very book whose discovery would result in their death, then just happens to drop it in plain sight of someone who turns them in for it. What stupefyingly bad luck, no?
I'm going to reserve judgment on all of this, but I'm going to be really interested in what happens if these stories turn out to be urban legends in the end. Will their retractions get the same kind of media coverage as the original claims?
Oh, come on. I don't even need to ask that question, do I?
(I'm seeing a press release: "We must invade North Korea and affect a regime change since its leader is a tyrannical despot who has committed hideous crimes against his own people." Man, that sounds familiar. I'm betting incubators will be involved somehow.)
