June 2006

Justin at RightontheRight.com isn’t thinking straight — again. He’s crying that the sky is falling in the wake of yesterday’s decision by the US Supreme Court in the Hamdan case. Apparently he is laboring under the delusion that the only options left are to release all suspected terrorists, or try them in civilian courts:

Do we release dangerous terrorists back into the world, or do we spend years upon years trying every single one of them in a civilian court… Congress is going to have to do something, as we simply can’t begin trying hundreds of foreign enemies in our domestic courts. I wonder if our soldiers in Iraq may now have to shoot instead of detain terrorists, just so they don’t have to make countless court appearances. Can you believe this idiocy?

Caveat: I have yet to read all 185 pages of the Hamdan decision [PDF], but I would certainly be surprised to find that the Supreme Court mandated the use of civilian courts in trying terror suspects. Read the rest of this entry »

Yes, that Misha. The potty-mouthed, reality-challenged blowhard who goes by the name of “Emperor Darth Misha I” (no megalomania there, eh?) is completely full of shit.

So is most of the rest of the rightwing blogosphere. The hysteria du jour they’re hyping is that the New York Times revealed “covert measures” when it published a story detailing the Bush administration’s use of bank records to track terrorists. Unfortunately, Misha and his fellow dimwits have succeeded only in exposing their own ignorance. There was nothing secret about the “Terrorist Finance Tracking Program”, save for the fact that it was carried out without judicial oversight. Read the rest of this entry »

Kit Jarrell demonstrates her tenuous grasp of the facts again.

Quoting a CNN report, she claims that witnesses to the killing of an Iraqi civilian are "lying". What does the CNN report actually say?

An autopsy report on the Iraqi civilian a squad of Marines are accused of murdering in April indicates the man may not have been disabled as his family reported, defense sources said Wednesday.

A preliminary, partial report released to defense lawyers does not mention any deformity or other injury consistent with a permanent disability, a source familiar with the evidence told CNN.

Seven Marines and a Navy medical corpsman have been charged with killing Hasham Ibrahim Awad in the town of Hamdaniya, west of Baghdad, on April 26. Prosecutors began handing over computer discs that contain the evidence against the men to their lawyers last week.

Awad’s body had been exhumed as part of the investigation. The remains were severely decomposed by the time the autopsy was performed, sources told CNN.

Let’s see… this CNN report is based on a “preliminary, partial report” of an autopsy on a body that was “severely decomposed by the time the autopsy was performed”. The report is one that Kit herself has not seen. Yet she knows for a fact that the witnesses were lying.

I wonder what else Kit knows without having any evidence to support her accusations.

(Aside: I can find no indication that the new Euphoric Reality site accepts trackbacks. Gotta wonder if Kit and Heidi are trying hard to insulate themselves from any criticism…)

If the facts don’t support your preconceived notions, argue personalities. That would seem to be Woody’s motto as he stumbles through another post about Al Gore’s movie ‘An Inconvenient Truth’.

Woody opens with one of his typically empty claims:

When I read the Associated Press article titled "Scientists OK Gore’s Movie for Accuracy", I went to see the substance of that claim and realized that it was more leftist fluff than fact.

Next, the expected ad hominem attack:

The AP article quotes Robert Correll, the chairman of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment group. It appears from the article that Correll has a personal relationship with Gore, having viewed the film at a private screening at the invitation of the former Vice President. Maybe he got free popcorn along with some grants, too.

If Woody doesn’t have the facts, he’ll smear. Every single time.

In her latest attempt to avoid answering a very simple question, Cao provides both some unintended entertainment and further confirmation that one of the most common traits — perhaps even a prerequisite — of being an ultra-rightwing blogger is the inability to draw rational conclusions from the data at hand.

Her post "Miami 7, Islam and media lies" has a number of obvious flaws. The first appears in the very first sentence:

Apparently some people simply don’t know about the Nation of Islam and its ideological connecton with Al Qaeda and terrorism (which was apparent in the comments section of this post).

Now, why does Cao need to establish this ‘ideological connecton’ (sic)? Simple… to date, there has been reported no tangible evidence linking the seven suspects to anyone in the Nation of Islam. So, lacking a substantive connection, Cao is forced to reach back into the history of the Nation of Islam and invent the vaporous ‘ideological connection’ as a justification for tying the NOI to the alleged terrorists. Read her claims carefully — the ideological connection is the only connection she even tries to make between the seven terror suspects and the Nation of Islam. Read the rest of this entry »

From all indications, it doesn’t take much talent at all to be a rabidly right-wing blogger. You need a lot of rage, the willingness to make accusations and draw conclusions based on little or no evidence, and the conviction that anyone who holds a view that deviates even slightly from your own is a moron, a traitor, or both.

Oh, and you must be utterly unwilling to answer simple questions. Even better, you have to be ready to run away from those questions like a scared little bunny. Cao has just provided us with an excellent example of this trait, in the comments section for her post " Seven swore allegiance to Al Qaeda in Miami". Read the rest of this entry »

Jay Stephenson, who has already proven himself to be a liar, makes some snarky comments about recently released reports detailing abuse of prisoners by the US military. Let’s examine just how ignorant Jay proves himself to be.

To start with, Jay gets the most basic details of the reports wrong. He claims (with evident sarcasm) that the documents reveal the “horrible terror techniques of our ‘evil’ military at Gitmo”, when in fact the reports do not examine allegations of detainee abuse at Guantanamo Bay at all. The AP story that Jay links to makes this crystal clear

[The documents] included two major reports – one by Army Brig. Gen. Richard Formica on specials operations forces in Iraq and one by Brig. Gen. Charles Jacoby on Afghanistan detainees.

Note that Jay must have read this story, because he quotes the sentence immediately preceding. Gawd DAMN, Jay, how willfully blind ignorant can one man be? Read the rest of this entry »

Andrew “Gribbit” Richardson apparently does not like having his words subjected to serious scrutiny. He finds being fact-checked extremely distressing… as well he should. His command of the facts is feeble, at best.

Most amazing is his claim to total honesty:

I DO NOT LIE.

One tiny problem: Gribbit does indeed lie, and that can be proven. Read the rest of this entry »