Dumb and dumber and dumberer and dumbererer and…

Amazing. Just when you think the wingnuts cannot top themselves for flagrant idiocy, they manage to do just that.

Any number of overwrought right-wing screech monkeys, among them Ace of Spades, Jim Hoft aka Gateway Pundit, and everyone’s favorite walking 404 error Big Dog, have been howling their outrage at the thought that former President Jimmy Carter revealed a few days ago that Israel has nuclear weapons. Oh, the horror!

Ace of Spades whines:

Israel has never publicly acknowledged its nuclear capabilities — including whether it even has nuclear weapons — but the former president, who has a fetish for screwing over Israel, can probably be considered a reliable source.

Jim Hoft aka Gateway Pundit mewls:

Let’s hope this man is not privy to any more national secrets.

And Big Dog huffs:

He has divulged one of Israel’s secrets. Carter told the world that Israel has nuclear weapons and then told everyone that the country has 150 of them. Carter disclosed a secret that has been held closely by other presidents as well as the Israeli government.

Of course, the correct response to all this wide-eyed bloviating is the usual: Point at the capering clowns and laugh.

It’s been common knowledge for years that Israel possesses a nuclear arsenal:

The Nobel Foundation: “In the fall of 1986, a former Israeli nuclear technician, Mordechai Vanunu, disclosed illegally possessed evidence proving that Israel, by all meaningful definitions of the term, was indeed a nuclear weapons state, and a powerful one as well. Drawing on Vanunu’s photographs from the bomb factory underneath the small Dimona nuclear reactor, Western experts concluded that Israel at the time probably had acquired enough fissile material to produce more than 100 nuclear bombs and warheads. Today, Israel may possess as much as 150-200 nuclear weapons.”

USATODAY.com , April 2004: “Israel continues to make nuclear weapons, said Friedrich Steinhaeusler, a former IAEA nuclear safety expert who now is a physics professor at the University of Salzburg. The best estimates put the size of the Israeli arsenal at 150 nuclear weapons, Steinhaeusler said.”

And as for the claim that this was a secret jealously guarded by the United States and Israel? Well, not so much…

Haaretz, September 2006: “Incoming U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told a Senate committee on Thursday that Israel has nuclear weapons, and that this partially explains Iran’s motiviation to acquire nuclear weapons.”

The Guardian, December 2006: “Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert, was yesterday trying to fend off accusations of ineptitude and calls for his resignation after he accidentally acknowledged for the first time that Israel had nuclear weapons. After decades in which Israel has stuck to a doctrine of nuclear ambiguity, Mr Olmert let slip during an interview in Germany that Israel did indeed have weapons of mass destruction. He told Germany’s Sat.1 channel on Monday evening: “Iran, openly, explicitly and publicly, threatens to wipe Israel off the map. Can you say that this is the same level, when they are aspiring to have nuclear weapons, as America, France, Israel and Russia?””

This is clearly another feeble attempt to gin up yet another firestorm of faux hysteria, based on equal parts manipulation and ignorance. The entire rightwing blogosphere has, at best, the collective brainpower of half a load of stale pumpernickel — and that’s a very generous estimate.