Bombast for a Memory Hole
What mental pygmy at the New York Times wrote this piece of crap editorial yesterday? (Emphases mine)
The last thing this country needs as it heads into this election season is another attempt to push the intelligence agencies to hype their conclusions about the threat from a Middle Eastern state.
That’s what happened in 2002, when the administration engineered a deeply flawed document on Iraq that reshaped intelligence to fit President Bush’s policy. And history appeared to be repeating itself this week, when the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, released a garishly illustrated and luridly written document that is ostensibly dedicated to “helping the American people understand” that Iran’s fundamentalist regime and its nuclear ambitions pose a strategic threat to the United States.
It’s hard to imagine that Mr. Hoekstra believes there is someone left in this country who does not already know that. But the report obviously has different aims. It is partly a campaign document, a product of the Republican strategy of scaring Americans into allowing the G.O.P. to retain control of Congress this fall. It fits with the fearmongering we’ve heard lately — like President Bush’s attempt the other day to link the Iraq war to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Okay. The Times takes it for granted that the whole country already knows that a nuclearized Iran is a danger. Remember that. And then consider how we know that.
Do I really need to dredge up the many dozens of Democratic, European, and international assessments of Saddam Hussein as a regional menace and a threat to world peace and stability? Oh, come on! It’s late and you fucking well know the facts.
But we didn’t know them. Or we did. Yet Saddam’s overthrow —based on all that terrible false intelligence— is a fait accompli that not even Hillary Rodham Clinton —the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee for 2008— is willing to publicly regret having advocated.
Just remember, though: the New York Times says we already know that Iran is a danger. Now. It is a danger now.
Next:
It’s obvious that Iran wants nuclear weapons, has lied about its program and views America as an enemy. We enthusiastically agree that the United States needs every scrap of intelligence it can get on Iran. But the reason American intelligence is not certain when Iran might have a nuclear bomb is because the situation is so murky — not because the agencies are too wimpy to tell the scary truth.
This is just absurd. What’s so “murky” about Iran and its nuclear amibitions? This editorial repeatedly concedes that Iran is actively seeking nuclear weapons. It says it’s “obvious.”
But “the situation”? It’s just so…murky.
Just remember: in the summer of 2006, the New York Times said that everybody already knows that Iran is a threat and that it wants nuclear weapons and that this Administration and its scaremonger allies were wrong to remind the American People and the world that we cannot allow these Islamofascist lunatics to obtain that power.
The anti-war Left is a boundless rectal cavity where logic and sense vanish.
