Wednesday, October 27, 2004

More incompetence and the efficacy of the right wing misinformation machine

I want to hand it to the right half of the blogsphere for sticking to the adage of “When life gives you lemons, tell everyone that NBC is working on a report that each lemon in fact contain a golden wish coin.”

So recently, it was revealed that there were not enough troops in Iraq to guard all the explosives in Iraq, specifically the approximately 400 tons now missing from Al QaaQa. Now, a normal person would look at this and say, “There is no way to spin this.” You would be wrong. Let’s take a look at the different “explanations” rightists have been asked to believe in the past two or three days:

The Liberal media will back us up Defense:
Have the Drudge Report throw up a news item that NBC will be reporting that the administration was not at fault. Although NBC is part of the liberal media, they report things helpful from to us from time to time. We can’t exactly explain why. Later, when the NBC article fails to absolve the administration or even reflect anything of what drudge said, we will continue to talk about Drudge as one of the few “legitimate” bloggers.

The shoot the Moon defense:
“Well, if these weapons were so dangerous, don’t they count as WMDs?” Actually, no. They’re only dangerous because we’re in Iraq. Also, you are an idiot.

The chicken hawk defense:
“Typical liberal: blaming the military! You should have more respect for our men and women in uniform.” Well, I guess if we respected them as much as you did, we wouldn’t care to make sure that they had enough of them in Iraq to do the job right. Perhaps if we loved the military so much we’d want to kill 1000 of them off because we couldn’t wait a year or two till Afghanistan was settled.

The Fascist defense:
“This is just another in the complaint of the blame America first crowd. Perhaps if they, like us, understood that Republican presidents embody America they would understand that trying to find out who made a mistake that hurt America is wrong if the person who made that mistake is Bush. Clinton on the other hand is totally to blame for continuing the successful policy of containment. Blaming Clinton is different from blaming America because we say so and we are jerks.”

It was like that when I got here defense.
“Let’s go back to our old logs and see if we can pretend that we had someone look into this right away. Oh! Here’s something. Some American troops rolled through town at the beginning of the war. Let’s just assume they did a thorough search and found everything missing already. What? The commander of that unit gave and interview and explained that he didn’t have a quarter of the troops that he would have needed to check the weapons? He also says that he was too involved in actually fighting to spare men for that task? Hmmmm….”

Blame the UN defense:
“The IAEA was supposed to guard them. They did a bad job.” Well, they were supposed to guard them until Bush told them all to leave. You remember, right? Right before the invasion Bush had all the inspectors leave and Hans Blix was left on the floor of the UN kneeling on his scattered briefcase and papers with that weird look on his face like, “Why? What was… Why?” and he his hands were just opening and closing like he had the weapons in his grasp? Do you remember that? He cried.

The Unknowable unknowns defense:
“Well, I guess it’s just a mystery. Where did the weapons go? Could we have protected them better? Well… we shouldn’t talk about this until after the election… err, I mean after we’ve had a thorough investigation by the Republican congress. Certainly, they’ll get to the bottom of this. What with all those young republican ‘Federalists’ running around we’ll surely take our responsibility to police the presidency seriously. We mean it this time.”

Update: Talking Points Memo goes into more detail about Fox news and Mooney Times spin. In his update he links to a NY Times story where they interview Iraqis that looted Al QaQaa after the US was supposedly in control.

John Kerry in a landslide, people.

Update: This is awsome. Video from reporters embedded with US military showing explosives at the facility a the time US troops were there.

posted by Tommaso Sciortino at 8:52 AM

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