TOBY PETZOLD

Richard Wolffe, one of Keith Olbermann’s army of arm-sheaths, made an interesting observation on MSNBC this evening about an actual ”failing” of Obama’s campaign: he doesn’t use surrogates enough to field the incoming.

Yeah? Well, let’s see if we can find some surrogates for this poor man! Now that he’s disowned his own spiritual adviser and let go several policy advisers, he’s probably needing someone to step in and keep him from accusing the President of attacking him as an appeaser in a speech before the Israeli Knesset when the President didn’t even refer to him —either by name or intimation.

Hilariously, the White House came back later in the day —after Obama made of the speech what he needed for the cameras— to say that Bush was actually referencing Jimmy Carter, who has recently been drawing on Hamas’ pipe and getting humiliated in the process.

On balance, I’d say that Obama should have kept quiet since there was no need to impugn himself on a reference not even intended for him. He’s the one who chose to associate himself with Carter’s recent embarrassments by taking offense in Carter’s stead. That shows some deep insecurity and a guilty conscience —guilty of mistaking yourself for a stupid old man who recently got played by a bunch of Nazi Submitters.

Hillary thinks she’s above showing a little leg, but she’s wrong. Get feminized, woman, or forget about the Oval Office.

It’ll be funny if the Democrats actually make an essentially unknown black man their nominee just because he’s opposed to a war that he and they don’t have sense enough to recognize as historically positive for Arab/Muslim democracy and for American business. Wouldn’t that be something like conceding the bankruptcy of their position on this war and going ahead with a choice that says, “Look at us! We stood by our convictions and made a minority our nominee just so we could look ourselves in the eye again.”?

The System won’t let Hillary lose this nomination. Bill won’t allow it.

My very spirit cringes at times like these when I realize how dead and isolationist are the Democrats and so-called “progressives” in this country.

There was a genuine kind of martyrdom met in Rawalpindi yesterday —but how is it anything more than some piece in the grand conspiracy of the Neocon Cabal That Rules All? Will this flawed, but essentially fearless, woman’s sacrifice be recognized and honored by women in the West? Is democracy so banal and mundane to us that its bravest proponents in the Muslim world can be brought down in blood and it is merely to shrug?

Democracy cannot win if its enemies are not first destroyed.

Musharraf needs to kill more bad guys. He needs to pile them to the sky.

Harry Reid is on the TV telling Ray Suarez that the War for Iraq is the “biggest foreign policy blunder in the history of this country.”

Where the fuck is this guy’s mind? Is he drunk? I think he’s suffering from some sort of dementia if he cannot understand how to make the transition from using the war as a political tool in the hands of anti-American Democrats like himself to finally admitting that he’s a lying, ineffectual piece of shit who’s never been right about anything.

The incompetence of Reid and the rest of the Eleven Percenters is a danger to the integrity of the Republic.

John Hinderaker observes:

Every NIE is, by definition, supposed to represent a “consensus” of all of the intelligence agencies. Yet those who actually write the report obviously exercise great influence, and when the “consensus” of seventeen agencies does a 180-degree U-turn, it is reasonable to shine a spotlight on the authors.

This is the same thinking that invited the scrutiny of Robert Novak and others into the backstory of Joe Wilson’s notorious excretions in the New York Times. Who, exactly, is writing this stuff is of great interest to all and I think more should be said about it.

Remember Alger Hiss? He was exactly who Richard Nixon said he was.

Ewen MacAskill of the Guardian Unlimited writes:

But pivotal to the US investigation into Iran’s suspect nuclear weapons programme was the work of a little-known intelligence specialist, Thomas Fingar. He was the principal author of an intelligence report published on Monday that concluded Iran, contrary to previous US claims, had halted its covert programme four years ago and had not restarted it. Almost single-handedly he has stopped - or, at the very least, postponed - any US military action against Iran.

His report marks a decisive moment in the battle between American neoconservatives and Washington’s foreign policy and intelligence professionals - between ideologues and pragmatists. It provided an unexpected victory for those opposed to the neocon plans for a military strike.

The report, the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), which represents the consensus of the 16 US intelligence agencies, gave President George Bush one of his most difficult weeks since taking office in January 2001.

Fingar’s findings were met in many Washington offices occupied by foreign policy and intelligence professionals not only with relief but with rejoicing. They had lost out in the run-up to the war in Iraq in 2003, but they are winning this one.

Well…one can plainly see the importance that Iran’s sympathizers and apologists have invested this NIE with. The degenerate pacifists of Eurabia are determined to sell out their own civilization to keep the peace with Islamist psychopaths. Disgusting.

A couple of days ago, an Iranian ”supervision bureau” executed a 21 year-old gay man for sex-related crimes he supposedly committed several years before.

Government-ordered executions of homosexuals is one of those things one might suppose would anger the “progressive” West, but no. It’s more important to undermine Bush in his fight against the mullahcracy.

ABC News’ Jonathan Karl writes:

On Nov. 2, 2005, the Washington Post detailed the CIA’s secret prison program known as “black sites.” It was November 2005 that the CIA destroyed the tapes.

[Director of Central Intelligence Michael] Hayden said the tapes were destroyed because “they were no longer of intelligence value” and that they posed “a serious security risk” because if leaked, they’d reveal the identity of covert CIA agents.

That was probably a good move for Hayden, considering that nothing exists for Big Media anymore if it cannot be seen and, thereby, believed. And when there’s an agenda to be pushed, the anonymous leak of such a video would have been inevitable. But, in response to Hayden’s rationale, the old liberal stalwart Ted Kennedy observed:

“That excuse won’t wash … How is it possible that the director of the CIA has so little faith in his own agency?”

That’s some glib bidness, Teddy. Have you already forgotten George Tenet’s many failures? How about farming out the intell gathering to the loudmouthed spouse of a supposedly undercover agent? How about nutjobs like Michael Scheuer and the other shit-stirrers dropping the dime to whichever Big Media organ is ready to go with their latest [whistleblowing]?

Do the leakers know when to stop?

So the CIA recorded itself torturing al-Qaeda terrorists and then destroyed the recording. Why is the public even in a position to know that either event occurred?

How different a world it would be if the idiots at Abu Ghraib had thought to destroy the evidence of their own shameful stupidity.

I wonder if the leakers in the CIA, the DoJ, the State Department, and wherever else actually know when to stop. Is it an orchestrated effort? How much of this stuff is disinformation?

Who is the enemy?

The assessment by some in the anti-war/anti-Bush segments of the IC and diplomatic communities that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 is, as I have explained elsewhere, irrelevant. But, while its authors may have had their own agenda in promulgating it, the NIE may ultimately serve instead to divine where people stand on the issue of Iran with the Bomb.

If this be disinformation, make the most of it.

I encourage all Democrats opposed to this Administration’s policies in the Middle East to step up and declare with all their heart their firm belief that they know for a fact that Iran stopped and has not restarted its nuclear weapons program.

Please. Step up.

The Democrats aren’t buying this crap about the President not knowing until just recently that the NIE on Iran’s nuclear weapons program says that it was stopped in 2003. They believe he must have known about it no later than this past summer.

In an October 17 news conference, Bush said that “If you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.”

And four days later, Vice President Dick Cheney told a Washington think tank that Iran would face “serious consequences” from the international community if it continued to enrich uranium.

You’ll notice that neither man’s remark really has anything at all to do with the NIE’s findings. It is, in fact, our purpose to keep Iran from getting the Bomb and destroying Israel. You can be sure that’s Israel’s purpose. And, bless their hearts, the Israelis’ standard of proof on this particular issue remains somewhat higher than our own. They’re just not as goddamned certain as Joe Biden is, but what are you going to do?

We don’t want World War III. Therefore, we will see to it that there are serious consequences if the Iranians don’t stop enriching uranium for their so-called civilian energy sector. They are doing that, regardless of how high the “confidence” is that they’ve stopped it with respect to weapons. 

The President and Mr. Cheney misspoke? Not to this, they didn’t.

At the bottom of these controversies over our intelligence assessments of Iran lies a single fact: none of them matters. Right or wrong, yes or no, the inevitability of conflict with Iran was begun when the nauseating Jimmy Carter allowed them to humiliate us in 1979. That debt has never been paid. It is right that we should plant our foot in Iran —like some colossal Alexander of infidel proportions.

The Dinnerjacket and his fellow revolutionaries will surely live long enough to see their movement come to be reviled and discarded by their own children and grandchildren. Then a fine market will Persia make!