Clay blissfully ignores the facts yet again

Over at the hilariously misnamed blog “In My Right Mind”, uber-cretin Clay has revealed that (as usual) he is quite happy to expose his utter lack of concern for the facts. Not only that, but he highlights just how persistently ignorant he chooses to be.

He has published what he no doubt believes is a clever little cartoon, blaming the “liberals” and the New York Times specifically for “tell[ing] the terrorists how we are tracking their financial transactions”. Clay is referring to an article published by the NYT on June 23, 2006 (ten months ago) that discussed the use of a database known as Swift to track the financial transactions of terrorists and terrorist suspects. The right-wing screechmonkeys shrieked and clutched their pearls and proclaimed loudly that the NYT had committed “treason” by revealing this super-duper-secret fact — despite the fact that the Bush administration had trumpeted for years their efforts to eavesdrop on the financial transactions of terrorists. The claim that this monitoring was a deep, dark secret tactic until the NYT published their report was quickly debunked when Victor Comras pointed out that:

…reports on US monitoring of SWIFT transactions have been out there for some time. The information was fairly well known by terrorism financing experts back in 2002.

I pointed out at the time how utterly without merit the claim of “treason” was. Nothing has changed since then — it’s still an incredibly stupid and dishonest accusation to make.

Poor, dumb Clay. He is either being deliberately dishonest by dredging up this ancient right-wing lie, or he really is so pathetically ignorant that he doesn’t know how quickly and thoroughly the accusations of “treason” were discredited. Either way, there is one and only one lesson that Clay’s latest droolings can teach us: