May 2009

Shorter Big Dog:

• Oh my yes, it’s absolutely wrong to kill an abortion doctor, and here are my suggestions for how the murderer can beat the rap.

  ‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard, and shamelessly pilfered from Sadly, No.

  UPDATE 06/01/09 11:19 AM EDT: Big Dog’s commenters are making it very clear that they are not pro-life; they are pro-if-you-do-something-we-disagree-with-you-should-die. Just like Big Dog himself…

By now it should be obvious to all but the most blinkered that wingnuts lie, constantly and endlessly and enthusiastically. That’s what they do. One useful side-effect of watching the wingnuts ply their dishonest trade is that in the search for the information needed to expose said lies, new and valuable resources can be uncovered.

In a recent comment thread, lying wingnut Jeff Burhans posted the following:

The Facists exterminated not just the Communists and any other left-wing parties, but ALL other parties. Not due to any ideological differences or similarities, but as a means of removing other threats to their hold on the levers of power. Exactly as the Communists did in the Soviet Union. Much as the current crop of Democrats is working to destroy any opposition to their destruction of the United States as a Constitutional Republic. In fact, let’s listen to the President on that very topic:

“U.S. has suffered from a fundamentally flawed Constitution…”

Of course, Burhans conveniently forgot to include any link to a transcript of the actual speech. I’ve been unable to find such a transcript, though I admit I have not conducted an exhaustive search. My good friend Green Eagle pointed out the essential dishonesty of Burhan’s babblings:

You use this remark to claim that Obama is about to destroy the constitution. In fact, as you well know, Obama made this remark in a 2006 speech at a conference on the constitution and racism, and the flaw he was speaking about was the constitution’s failure to end slavery. This is a really malicious lie, because it is not a deliberate historical distortion like your comments about the Nazis, but a vicious smear against a living person.

As I said, I haven’t turned up a transcript of Obama’s speech yet. But during the search, I stumbled across ConWebWatch. Edited by Terry Krepel, the site is devoted to tracking and exposing the lies of the far right:

The focus of ConWebWatch is what I collectively call the ConWeb — large, well-funded, Internet-based conservative “news” organizations NewsMax, WorldNetDaily and CNSNews.com. I also look at conservative media “watchdogs” Media Research Center and Accuracy in Media, as well as the MRC’s NewsBusters blog.

Millions of dollars have been poured into the creation and promotion of these conservative web sites, with money coming from such sources as Richard Mellon Scaife and the usual armada of conservative foundations.

Additionally, conservative talk radio hosts often use these conservative news sites as sources of topics to discuss on their shows, giving the slanted, distorted and, on occasion, just plain inaccurate stories that appear on these sites an even greater audience.

The goal of ConWebWatch is to document the distortions, excesses and hypocrisy of these conservative media sites. Using their own words, ConWebWatch hoists the conservative media on the petard of hypocrisy, accuracy and objectivity.

I’ve added the site to my blogroll, and its feed to my feedreader. Worth a look.

Gary Wolf at Quantified Self has an excellent piece about how ex-Senator Bob Graham’s obsessive note-taking has taken the wind out the sails of the CIA’s fairy tale about having thoroughly briefed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on the use of torture…

Enter Bob Graham, ex-Governor and ex-Senator from Florida. Graham has been keeping careful handwritten records of his daily life since 1977, when he first ran for governor. He tracks a lot of things: weight, diet, what he wears, his location (down to the room), and of course the names of the people he meets with, his questions and their answers, his promises and theirs.

Good idea, right? Well, it was considered such an inexplicable eccentricity that some in the press actually speculated it made Al Gore think twice about offering him the vice-presidential nomination in the 2000 U.S. election season…

…

The CIA claimed that Pelosi had been briefed in detail about the torture, and didn’t make any objection until long afterward. Therefore, if there is to be any kind of sanction for torture, it should hit the top Democrat who approved it as well as members of the Republican administration who ordered it. Pelosi, though, denies having been briefed about the torture.

Well, it turns out that Bob Graham was also supposed to have been briefed on these topics, and the CIA forwarded to him the dates of the meetings he supposedly attended. But the CIA records were inaccurate, according to his own personal records. Such was the respect for Graham’s notebooks, that this line of attack was closed within 48 hours.

This is interesting for several reasons. First, it’s worth noting that one man’s spiral bound notebooks were able to accumulate enough credibility to defeat the records of an organization whose very reason for existence is to collect information, communicate it to trusted members of government, and keep records of these communications. Anybody who has been following some of the controversy about patient records can add this strange example to their list of favorite anecdotes. Personal data, kept by a dedicated and interested party, even using yesterday’s technology, will trump large scale collection systems managed by bureaucrats.

Note that the shrieking wingnuts who are messing their pants over this faux-controversy are taking great care to ignore the fact that the CIA itself refuses to vouch for the accuracy of its records in this matter.

(hat tip: BoingBoing)

Our good friend Dr. Raven is famous for her diagnostic abilities. She can tell just from reading a newspaper account that a soldier who returned from Iraq with PTSD is merely ”[choosing] to swallow pills and watch TV in the dark — to shut himself in”. Her remarkable skills have attracted the attention they so justly deserve.

So one must ask: What diagnosis will the brilliant Dr. Raven provide when she reads the story of Kim Tanner?

Mr. Tanner worked as a truck driver while serving with the Army, often driving 12 to 14 hours a day delivering weapons and supplies throughout Iraq. The effects of numerous blasts from exploding roadside bombs have left him suffering from severe PTSD and traumatic brain injuries. He was discharged with a 50 percent disability rating.

Today he lives with memory loss, speech impairment and hearing loss. He is unable to work long periods of time at his part-time post-office job.

Will the infallible Dr. Raven diagnose Kim Tanner as “choosing to be this person because others are enabling him”? Surely she will conclude that Tanner is “exploiting [his] battle experiences to their fullest advantage”, that we should all be “very skeptical of [his] “problems””, and that “something isn’t right” with this story.

We breathlessly await your expert disganosis, Dr. Raven.

Reliable as the dawn, the dimwitted wingnut “Big Dog” once again wedges his foot firmly in his mouth. He makes a huge fuss over a recent statement by Al Gore, claiming that Gore should have run a Google search before making a claim about his (Gore’s) past statements.

But, “Big Dog” being the cretin that he is, cannot help but make an ass of himself in the very first sentence:

One would think the guy who claimed to invent the Internet would be able to use it to verify something before making a statement that is completely inaccurate.

One would think that even a moron like “Big Dog” would consider that before raking someone over the coals for not using the Internet, it might be prudent if he were to actually use the Internet to check his own claims. What’s the first result for the Google search “gore invented internet”?

Internet of Lies

Claim: Vice-President Al Gore claimed that he “invented” the Internet.

Status: False.

Origins: Despite the derisive references that continue even today, Al Gore did not claim he “invented” the Internet, nor did he say anything that could reasonably be interpreted that way. The “Al Gore said he ‘invented’ the Internet” put-downs were misleading, out-of-context distortions of something he said during an interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN’s “Late Edition” program on 9 March 1999. When asked to describe what distinguished him from his challenger for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey, Gore replied (in part):

During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country’s economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.

Clearly, although Gore’s phrasing might have been a bit clumsy (and perhaps self-serving), he was not claiming that he “invented” the Internet (in the sense of having designed or implemented it), but that he was responsible, in an economic and legislative sense, for fostering the development the technology that we now know as the Internet. To claim that Gore was seriously trying to take credit for the “invention” of the Internet is, frankly, just silly political posturing that arose out of a close presidential campaign. Gore never used the word “invent,” and the words “create” and “invent” have distinctly different meanings — the former is used in the sense of “to bring about” or “to bring into existence” while the latter is generally used to signify the first instance of someone’s thinking up or implementing an idea. (To those who say the words “create” and “invent” mean exactly the same thing, we have to ask why, then, the media overwhelmingly and consistently cited Gore as having claimed he “invented” the Internet, even though he never used that word, and transcripts of what he actually said were readily available.)

How’s that foot taste, dogmeat?

ThinkProgress has compiled a comprehensive document laying out exactly Why Bush’s ‘Enhanced Interrogation’ Program Failed:

• Gen. Petraeus: Torture yields information ‘of questionable value.’

“Some may argue that we would be more effective if we sanctioned torture or other expedient methods to obtain information from the enemy. That would be wrong. Beyond the basic fact that such actions are illegal, history shows that they also are frequently neither useful nor necessary. Certainly, extreme physical action can make someone ‘talk;’ however, what the individual says may be of questionable value.” [Gen. David Petraeus, Letter to Multi-National Force-Iraq, 5/10/07]

Joe Conason lays out in straightforward style the evidence that the US under Bush/Cheney employed torture to justify the war in Iraq:

Looking back, we now know that coerced confessions — and in particular the questionable assertions by [al-Qaida operative Ibn al-Shaykh] al-Libi — were highlighted by administration officials promoting the case for war with Iraq, in the landmark Cincinnati speech by President Bush in October 2002 and in Colin Powell’s crucial presentation to the U.N. Security Council in February 2003, the eve of the war.

Whether Bush, Cheney and their associates were seeking real or fabricated intelligence, they knowingly employed methods that were certain to produce the latter — as American officials well knew because those same techniques, especially water torture, had been used to elicit false confessions from captured Americans as long ago as World War II and the Korean conflict.

Cheney now claims that he preserved the country from terrorism and saved thousands and perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives. We need a serious investigation, with witnesses including the former vice-president under oath, to determine what he and his associates actually did with the brutal powers they arrogated to themselves — because instead their actions cost thousands upon thousands of American and Iraqi lives, all in the service of a political lie.

It will be a generation or more before our country can regain the trust and respect of the world community. The damage done to this nation by the cowards who insisted on the use of torture (as well as the cowards who actually carried out the torture) is incalculable.

(hat tip: Hullabaloo)