May 2007

A filing by prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald yesterday [PDF] reveals that Valerie Plame Wilson was, in fact, a covert CIA operative at the time her identity was made public:

At the time of the initial unauthorized disclosure in the media of Ms. Wilson’s employment relationship with the CIA on 14 July 2003, Ms. Wilson was a covert CIA employee for whom the CIA was taking affirmative measures to conceal her intelligence relationship to the United States.

Fitzgerald has taken this information from an unclassified summary of Ms. Plame’s employment history released by the CIA.

The right wing blogosphere has been vociferous in its denial that Ms. Plame was a covert operative. They’ve done this because, if Plame were covert, then several members of the Bush administration complicit in the exposure of her identity could also be complicit in the commission of an act of treason. It’s an article of winger faith that nobody on the right would ever commit a crime for political gain. Oh, merciful heavens no. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a cliche in the movies known as “the idiot plot”. This is the movie in which the major conflict would be solved instantly if not for the fact that all the characters are a complete idiots. The classic example is the standard horror movie scenario: The hockey-masked killer is stalking the hallways of the high school/hospital/office building/whatever looking for fresh victims to dismember, and the main characters come up with the stupidest possible plan: “Let’s split up!”

Well, Crybaby Clay has come up with an improvement (?) on the idiot plot. Let’s call it the “drooling moron plot”. This variant requires that the reader be a drooling moron to accept Clay’s so-called “arguments”. A bit over a month ago, Crybaby Clay published a cartoon that repeated the long-discredited wingnut claim that the New York Times revealed a big secret when it published, in June 2006, an article detailing the US government’s use of the international banking transaction database called SWIFT to track the movement of money by terrorists. I pointed out to Clay that this fact was well known long before the NYT article, primarily due to a 1998 article in the Washington Post that noted the use of the SWIFT database for this precise purpose.

Crybaby Clay claimed he had a devastating counterargument that would demolish the assertion that the Washington Post article tipped off the terrorists years before the 2006 article appeared in the Times. He refused to reveal this bombshell, apparently believing that his claim alone would end the argument, and has maintained this farce for the past several weeks. Yesterday, Crybaby Clay finally deigned to publish this amazing work of deductive logic.

There’s only one word to describe what CC hath wrought:

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

I have to admit, this new religion could be a viable alternative to Pastafarianism…

That lying turd Gateway Pundit is at it again.

Every so often, he’ll post a graphic that supposedly proves that military deaths under Bush are far lower than they were under Clinton. What he never, ever, tells his readers is that he is comparing total military deaths (from both hostile and non-hostile actions) under Clinton to the number of deaths of military personnel under Bush counting Iraq and Afghanistan alone.

In other words, Gateway Pundit is deliberately skewing the numbers by leaving out military deaths that did not occur in those two theaters. The simple fact of the matter is that more military personnel have already died during the six-and-a-half years of the Bush administration than did during the entire eight-year Clinton administration.

One of GP’s commenters, using statistics from the Department of Defense, has pointed out the deception. As of this writing, GP hasn’t found the balls to answer. A similar tactic in a column that ran in the The New York Sun last February was quickly exposed as a fraud by Media Matters.

There’s a word for what Gateway Pundit does: lying. Nothing else fits. It seems to be GP’s main pastime. One wonders if he believes his own lies, or is simply marvelling at the ease with which he can bamboozle his readers.

While I’m on the subject of spot-on lists, I’d like to bring to your attention a great list that General J. C. Christian has compiled, showing just how few mistakes the administration of Our Sainted President™ has made. A small excerpt…

It’s not like this administration is completely mistake-ridden. These are the only mistakes I could come up with after thinking about it for a whole 5 minutes.

…

• Al Hurra, the government owned and operated public relations television network broadcasts terrorist messages, including exhortations to commit violence against Jews, to the Middle East. The mistake is excused because none of the management speaks Arabic.
• Upon taking Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld stations troops to defend the Oil Ministry against looters while leaving museums, arms depots, and nuclear facilities unguarded.
• The Vice President’s Chief of Staff makes a mistake when he lies to the FBI and a federal grand jury.
• White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and Chief of Staff Andrew Card attempt to strongarm a drugged, semi-coherent, hospitalized John Ashcroft into approving a state security apparatus operation against the people.
• Jose Padilla is arrested for plotting to explode a dirty bomb. The charges are later changed and Padilla is accused of plotting to turn on the gas in a number of apartments and then light a match to them. Those charges were eventually dropped and currently, Padilla is charged with being a Chechen Resistance recruiter and filling out an application to be a terrorist.
• 8.8 billion dollars is placed on pallets and transported to Iraq where it is never heard from again.