If You Read This, You Will Be Fired

The Ring

[Last Update: Dec. 14]

There is a a lot of disturbing news emanating from the Wikileaks story, but perhaps the scariest aspect regarding the latest release of classified documents comes from an email that was sent to students at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs from the Office of Career Services. It said that the office received a call from an alumnus at SIPA with a warning:

“He recommends that you DO NOT post links to these documents nor make comments on social media sites such as Facebook or through Twitter. Engaging in these activities would call into question your ability to deal with confidential information, which is part of most positions with the federal government.”

In a story titled, “Don’t Look, Don’t Read”, the New York Times says:

In a classic case of shutting the barn door after the horse has left, the Obama administration and the Department of Defense have ordered the hundreds of thousands of federal employees and contractors not to view the secret cables and other classified documents published by Wikileaks and news organizations around the world unless the workers have the required security clearance or authorization.

“Classified information, whether or not already posted on public websites or disclosed to the media, remains classified, and must be treated as such by federal employees and contractors, until it is declassified by an appropriate U.S. Government authority,” said the notice sent on Friday afternoon by the Office of Management and Budget, which is part of the White House, to agency and department heads, urging them to distribute it to their staff.

I think this is the first case I’ve ever heard of where everyday citizens have been threatened not to read a newspaper or website or to comment on it in personal conversations. And this despite the fact that the information is not only already leaked, but become the top story for every national and international media source in the past week. It appears that the State Department has decided that if it can’t stuff the genie back in the bottle, they’ll threaten it, demanding people to remain willfully ignorant of important news about their nation’s leaders and set aside their First Amendment rights if they ever want to get a job in their chosen field.

This reminds me of the movie The Ring, in which anyone who dares look at the disturbing images on a cursed video tape gets a phone call from the ghost of a young girl who informs the watcher that they’re going to die within the next week. But instead of the video tape being filled with what looks like outtakes of a Nine Inch Nails video, the disturbing images in this case consist of abuses and international crimes committed by United States politicians and other powerful leaders, who far from being embarrassed at being exposed, are empowering the state apparatus to make phone calls telling the viewer of the material that their career in this recession-driven economy will be killed.

So what exactly are these dangerous truths from Pandora’s Box so nefarious that the State Department feels they need to channel Jack Nicholson’s character from a “A Few Good Men”? Here’s a list:

* Iraqi officials believe Saudi Arabia, not Iran, is the greatest threat to a unified Iraq. “Iraqi contacts assess that the Saudi goal (and that of most other Sunni Arab states, to varying degrees) is to enhance Sunni influence, dilute Shia dominance and promote the formation of a weak and fractured Iraqi government.””

* The State Department pressured Germany out of criminally investigating the CIA’s kidnapping and torture of their citizens who turned out to be completely innocent.

* The United States also pressured Spain to suppress arrest warrants for three US soldiers involved in the death of Spanish television cameraman José Couso in Baghdad and to drop investigations of the use of their airport for secret CIA rendition and Guantánamo torture.

* The Obama Administration has been trying many different deals in order to persuade different countries to take prisoners from Guantamino Bay, including telling Slovenia they would have to take a prisoner if they wanted to meet with Obama. Jon Stewart called it the “Take a prisoner, Leave a prisoner” program.

* Many Arab Leaders have been calling on the United States to attack Iran, including the King of Saudi Arabia, who urged the U.S. to “cut off the head of the snake.” In December 2005, the Saudi king expressed his anger that the Bush administration had ignored his advice against going to war, and argued “that whereas in the past the U.S., Saudi Arabia and Saddam Hussein had agreed on the need to contain Iran, U.S. policy had now given Iraq to Iran as a ‘gift on a golden platter.’ ” The ambassador from Israel said Obama had 6 to 18 months “in which stopping Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons might still be viable.” After that, “any military solution would result in unacceptable collateral damage.” The United States also believes that Iran has acquired missiles from North Korea that will allow them to strike Europe. China repeatedly refused to act on detailed information regarding the shipments of missile parts from North Korea to Beijing, where they were loaded aboard Iran Air flights to Tehran.

* Hillary Clinton says that Washington has found it to be “an ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat terrorist financing emanating from Saudi Arabia as a strategic priority” and “Donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.” As Jon Stewart put it “So one of our main allies is the War on Terror is also one of the main funders of our War on Terror’s enemy while also saying not for nothing but if you were thinking of opening another front on the war on terror, hey, that’s good with us.”

* The US military covered up the killing of 41 civilians, including 14 women and 21 children, during a cluster bomb attack in south Yemen in December 2009. Yemen’s President Ali Abdullah Saleh told General Petraeus that his government would “continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours” since cluster bombs are highly controversial due to their high degree of collateral damage, as shown by the fact that the bomb killed 3 times as many civilians as alleged al-Qaida members. That’s why it’s banned by most of Europe and Africa as well as Canada, Mexico, Japan, and Australia.

* Discussions between Saudi Arabia and a US Ambassador noted that the Saudis arrested some 250 men on their way to join extremists in Afghanistan after being inspired by stories and photos of the torture in Abu Ghraib, where prisoners and their family members were raped, tortured and killed by Americans, including children.

* The British Government gave secret assurances that it would “protect US interests” at the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war.

* Harmad Karzai, the Afghani president the U.S. supports despite having stolen the last election, ordered the release of several dangerous criminals and drug traffickers. A U.S. official also called Karzai’s brother, Ahmad Wali, a corrupt drug dealer, which was already well known.

* The head of the Bank of England, Merbyn King, secretly co-authored the coalition strategy to enact a far more dramatic deficit-reduction program than any politician had advocated in violation of his duty to remain out of the political process and of the rules he himself imposed on his colleagues. The scandal has resulted in a former member of the bank’s financial committee to call for his resignation.

* An Israeli general admitted that Israel’s narrow focus on its qualitative military edge often conflicts with the global interests of the United States.

* An interior minister in Afghanistan begged the U.S. embassy to “quash” a scandal involving foreign contractors employed to train Afghan policemen who took drugs and paid for young “dancing boys” to entertain them. The official warned that the story would “endanger lives” and was particularly concerned that a video of the incident might be made public, but US diplomats correctly argued it would just cause an “overreaction” and make the story worse. The article about the incident was published in July by the Washington Post, which made little of the affair, saying it was an incident of “questionable management oversight” in which foreign DynCorp workers “hired a teenage boy to perform a tribal dance at a company farewell party”.

* Donald Rumsfeld knowingly lied when he said things were “calming” down following the 2006 attack on Shia’s al-Askari mosque in Samarra. Military troops reported gunmen attacking, open street fighting between Shia and Sunni militias, rocket-propelled grenade attacks on mosques, assassinations and kidnappings.

* The man who is expected to be China’s next head of government said in 2007 that China’s GDP figures are “man-made” and therefore unreliable.

* Both Hillary Clinton’s and Condaliza Rice’s State Department ordered diplomats to the U.N. to collect passwords, emails, and DNA samples in order to spy on top U.N. officials and others, probably violating the Vienna Treaty of 1961. Clinton responded by attacking Wikileaks, saying: “This is not just an attack on America’s foreign policy interests. It is an attack on the international community….” As noted in a New York Times article, that’s rather exaggerated.

Before this latest cache of cables, Wikileaks had also formerly showed evidence that the U.S. military formally adopted a policy of turning a blind eye to systematic, pervasive torture and other abuses by Iraqi forces.

Oh, and by an amazing coincidence, Sweden has suddenly charged Assange with the rape of two women. The charges involve Assange failing to use condoms with two women, the first of whom got angry over the fact that he was staying with her when he slept with the second woman. This first woman, a self-proclaimed “femininst,” persuaded the second woman to file rape charges against him, which were dismissed several months ago but has just now been reopened by a different prosecutor. It turns out that she also wrote ‘7 Steps to Legal Revenge’ on her website, explaining how women can use courts to get back on unfaithful lovers. Step 7 says: “Go to it and keep your goal in sight. Make sure your victim suffers just as you did.” She has mysteriously left Sweden for the Middle East, joining a Christian group helping Palestinians. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that the “Men in Black” gave her two options: Help sink Assange or get prosecuted for Malicious Prosecution, and she decided she didn’t want to do either.

Joe Lieberman managed to push Amazon into dropping Wikileaks, after which Wikileaks moved to a Seattle-based software company named Tabeau, which shortly afterwards dropped them as well thanks to Lieberman.

Wikileaks has allied itself with several newspapers, including the New York Times and the Guardian, allowing the newspapers to publish the information before he even posts it to his own site so that any attempt by various governments to prosecute him would be forced to prosecute those newspapers as well. Although Lieberman at first balked at the idea of suing the New York Times, he has since changed his position and is now advocating the New York Times be subjected to “a very intense inquiry by the Justice Department.”

One might think that the mainstream media, whose supposed job it is to inform the public about important events regarding the criminal actions of elected officials in a free society, would be using the opportunity to create a public debate about the systematic abuse of power that government officials have engaged in, but instead they have completely reversed their roles, automatically taking the side of the government and have instead focused the debate on Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange.

Wolf Blitzer said:

“And WikiLeaks has engaged in this contemptible behavior, and it will put a chill on conversations with U.S. diplomats especially in the gulf region where this is so sensitive. You know, they have the Saudi king quoted, you know, cut off the head of that snake telling the United States to go after Iran. To have the Yemenis quoted in this way, to have others, Abu Dhabi quoted in this way is going to make them very, very reluctant to have straight conversations with any sort of ambassador.”

And that’s supposed to be a bad thing.

Joe Klein of Time Magazine writes:

“If a single foreign national is rounded up and put in jail because of a leaked cable, this entire, anarchic exercise in “freedom” stands as a human disaster. Assange is a criminal. He’s the one who should be in jail.”

Sarah Palin repeated the lie that Assange “has blood on his hands” and criticized the White House for not acting sooner, asking “Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders?” Aside from her implication that Assange should be assassinated, she also called him a “traitor” despite the inconvenient fact that Assange is an Australian national. U.S. officials have actually conceded that there is no evidence that the documents have led to anyone’s death.

That didn’t stop John Hawkins from writing an article entitled “5 Reasons the CIA Should Have Already Killed Julian Assange”

Newt Gingrich says, “Information warfare is warfare. Julian Assange is engaged in warfare. Information terrorism, which leads to people getting killed is terrorism. And Julian Assange is engaged in terrorism. He should be treated as an enemy combatant and WikiLeaks should be closed down permanently and decisively.”

Democratic operative Bob Beckel said on Fox News, “I’m not for the death penalty, so…there’s only one way to do it: illegally shoot the son of a bitch.”

The highly influential conservative writer, Marc Thiessen, wrote that “Assange is a non-U.S. person operating outside the territory of the United States. This means the government has a wide range of options for dealing with him. It can employ not only law enforcement, but also intelligence and military assets, to bring Assange to justice and put his criminal syndicate out of business.” Eva Rodriguez asks, “Did my colleague, Marc Thiessen, just call for a drone strike in Iceland?” Thiessen said no.

Even Huckabee came right out and said, “Whoever in our government leaked that information is guilty of treason, and I think anything less than execution is too kind a penalty.”

Let’s put this in perspective.

James O’Keefe broke Maryland law when he videotaped ACORN officials without their knowledge. Maryland’s Wiretapping and Electronic Surveillance Act prohibits both surreptitious recordings and disclosure of those recordings, with a prison sentence of five years and a $10,000 fine. He lied to ACORN officials when he portrayed himself as a saint trying to save his girlfriend from a life of prostitution, recorded their reactions, fraudulently edited out the footage of how he set them up, and then lied to Fox News and other media officials by falsely claiming that he was dressed as a pimp. One particular ACORN official was caught apparently going along with an illegal activity but then called the police as soon as O’Keefe left, although that never came to light until much later. Both Republicans and Democrats in Congress reacted with unprecedented speed and immediately voted to suspend all funding to ACORN, which ultimately destroyed the organization. O’Keefe went on to get arrested for attempting to tamper with Mary Landrieu’s phone, was given a slap on the wrist, and then immediately proceeded to yet another attempt to break the same law in a ridiculous attempt to admittedly smear a correspondent from CNN. I haven’t noticed too many reporters in the mainstream media getting upset about this.

Then there was the case of Climate Gate, in which hackers illegally stole private emails from climate scientists and then posted it on Russian servers immediately prior to the Copenhagen Summit in an obvious attempt to engineer a political disaster for the conference. Wikileaks published these emails but rather than attack Wikileaks for “indiscriminate dumping,” right-wingers took the phrases out of context and effectively manipulated public opinion to believe that the entire scientific community was in on a gigantic world hoax to fool people into changing from fossil fuels to order to save the human species from unimaginable personal devastation. It worked. It doesn’t matter that three separate official investigations cleared everyone at East Anglia of any wrongdoing, nor does the fact that other media investigations by AP, Reuters, Factcheck.org and Politifact.com have also independently cleared them. Republican House Representative and Top Energy Chair Candidate for the Energy Committee Fred Upton has called for congressional hearings on Climategate. But if anyone can determine if the science is fraudulent, it’s climate deniers since their own 2006 climate report was plagiarized from textbooks, Wikipedia, and the writings of one of the scientists criticized in the report.

So, for most people in the world of politics and media, it’s all right to not only break wiretap and privacy laws regarding private citizens but also fraudulently edit and misrepresent them so as to propagandize the public with lies in order to manufacture political consent. In these cases, the mainstream media will typically, as Creationists call it, “teach the controversy,” usually minimalizing or downright eliminating the part about how the material was fraudulently edited so as to cover up their own shoddy preliminary reporting on the subject. As long as it fits into the mainstream media’s “left vs. right” narrative, anything is legitimate news.

But when an advocacy group dedicated to political transparency publishes classified information on the government abuses of political elites which embarrasses both parties — much of which had no right to be classified in the first place — in order to shine a light on the political realities of the world so that citizens actually have the ability to understand and make decisions on how to govern in a free and open democracy, in that case, said group is “contemptible,” has become a “traitor” to a nation they never lived in nor pledged any loyalty to, and should be declared an “enemy combatant” to be systematically assassinated without the need of any inconvenient trials.

Although this is a bit of a side topic, I’d also like to post an article written by Thomas Friedman in which he imagines what a cable of a Chinese official exposed by Wikileaks would look like:

Washington Embassy, People’s Republic of China, to Ministry of Foreign Affairs Beijing, TOP SECRET/Subject: America today.

Things are going well here for China. America remains a deeply politically polarized country, which is certainly helpful for our goal of overtaking the U.S. as the world’s most powerful economy and nation. But we’re particularly optimistic because the Americans are polarized over all the wrong things.

There is a willful self-destructiveness in the air here as if America has all the time and money in the world for petty politics. They fight over things like — we are not making this up — how and where an airport security officer can touch them. They are fighting — we are happy to report — over the latest nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia. It seems as if the Republicans are so interested in weakening President Obama that they are going to scuttle a treaty that would have fostered closer U.S.-Russian cooperation on issues like Iran. And since anything that brings Russia and America closer could end up isolating us, we are grateful to Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona for putting our interests ahead of America’s and blocking Senate ratification of the treaty. The ambassador has invited Senator Kyl and his wife for dinner at Mr. Kao’s Chinese restaurant to praise him for his steadfastness in protecting America’s (read: our) interests.

Americans just had what they call an “election.” Best we could tell it involved one congressman trying to raise more money than the other (all from businesses they are supposed to be regulating) so he could tell bigger lies on TV more often about the other guy before the other guy could do it to him. This leaves us relieved. It means America will do nothing serious to fix its structural problems: a ballooning deficit, declining educational performance, crumbling infrastructure and diminished immigration of new talent.

The ambassador recently took what the Americans call a fast train — the Acela — from Washington to New York City. Our bullet train from Beijing to Tianjin would have made the trip in 90 minutes. His took three hours — and it was on time! Along the way the ambassador used his cellphone to call his embassy office, and in one hour he experienced 12 dropped calls — again, we are not making this up. We have a joke in the embassy: “When someone calls you from China today it sounds like they are next door. And when someone calls you from next door in America, it sounds like they are calling from China!” Those of us who worked in China’s embassy in Zambia often note that Africa’s cellphone service was better than America’s.

But the Americans are oblivious. They travel abroad so rarely that they don’t see how far they are falling behind. Which is why we at the embassy find it funny that Americans are now fighting over how “exceptional” they are. Once again, we are not making this up. On the front page of The Washington Post on Monday there was an article noting that Republicans Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee are denouncing Obama for denying “American exceptionalism.” The Americans have replaced working to be exceptional with talking about how exceptional they still are. They don’t seem to understand that you can’t declare yourself “exceptional,” only others can bestow that adjective upon you.

In foreign policy, we see no chance of Obama extricating U.S. forces from Afghanistan. He knows the Republicans will call him a wimp if he does, so America will keep hemorrhaging $190 million a day there. Therefore, America will lack the military means to challenge us anywhere else, particularly on North Korea, where our lunatic friends continue to yank America’s chain every six months so that the Americans have to come and beg us to calm things down. By the time the Americans do get out of Afghanistan, the Afghans will surely hate them so much that China’s mining companies already operating there should be able to buy up the rest of Afghanistan’s rare minerals.

Most of the Republicans just elected to Congress do not believe what their scientists tell them about man-made climate change. America’s politicians are mostly lawyers — not engineers or scientists like ours — so they’ll just say crazy things about science and nobody calls them on it. It’s good. It means they will not support any bill to spur clean energy innovation, which is central to our next five-year plan. And this ensures that our efforts to dominate the wind, solar, nuclear and electric car industries will not be challenged by America.

Finally, record numbers of U.S. high school students are now studying Chinese, which should guarantee us a steady supply of cheap labor that speaks our language here, as we use our $2.3 trillion in reserves to quietly buy up U.S. factories. In sum, things are going well for China in America.

Thank goodness the Americans can’t read our diplomatic cables.

Embassy Washington.

Macho Gays Love Ann Coulter

So in the last post I talked about how 2004’s anti-gay crusade was run in large part by a gay man. This bears some relation to another story that was floating around at the time.

Almost a month ago, the Daily Beast ran a short article by Matt Latimer with the tag line: “The flap over Coulter’s speech to a gay Republican group shows that the right’s provocateur is a heck of a lot of more complicated than she’s made out to be.” In it he says: “When informed she could not participate in a political conference if she kept a commitment to speak to a group of gay Republicans, Ms. Coulter told organizers just what they could do with their conference. Noting that she speaks to all kinds of groups whose views she does not necessarily agree with—“the main thing I do is speak on college campuses, which is about the equivalent of speaking at an al Qaeda conference”—Coulter, in her own style, stood for something that conservatives are supposed to believe in: the free exchange of ideas.”

The Daily Beast is one of those centrist papers that tries to draw a false equivalency between the far left and far right to prove that they are in the middle. One of their latest books, Wingnuts, by John Avlon, for example, tries to compare Keith Olberman to Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin. As Bill Maher says, it’s “fake fairness.” Avlon tries to pretend that he’s independent even though he was the Chief Speechwriter and Deputy Policy Director for Rudy Giuliani’s 2008 Presidential Campaign. Avlon has made similar false equivalencies like comparing Code Pink interrupting a Karl Rove speech with the Hutaree militia trying to murder police officers.

So I guess Coulter is really reasonable for talking to gay Republicans because she’s talked to even more hostile groups, like college campuses where the crowd is “like al-Qaida.” And when the Republican Party punishes Coulter for not backing down from talking to a group of gay Republicans, it shows how brave and tolerant Coulter is, not how crazy and backwards the Republicans are.

The poster for the event reads, “GOPride Presents: Homocon 2010: Our gays are more macho than their straights!” Considering who ran the 2004 election, it should probably say, “Our gays are better gay-baiters than their straights!” I mean, I realize that sexual orientation does not change your economic beliefs, but how can anyone be “proud” of being part of a group that utterly loathes them? I don’t even like being thought of as a Democrat because of little things like the “professional Left” comment.

Avlon praises Coulter for standing up to Bill Kristol after Kristol said Steele should resign for his comment about Afghanistan being “Obama’s war” in her article “Bill Kristol Must Resign”:

Having some vague concept of America’s national interest — unlike liberals — the Bush administration could see that a country of illiterate peasants living in caves ruled by “warlords” was not a primo target for “nation-building.”

By contrast, Iraq had a young, educated, pro-Western populace that was ideal for regime change.

If Saddam Hussein had been a peach, it would still be a major victory in the war on terrorism to have a Muslim Israel in that part of the globe, and it sure wasn’t going to be Afghanistan (literacy rate, 19 percent; life expectancy, 44 years; working toilets, 7).

You see, Bush was really smart that he wanted to create a “Muslim Israel” in the Middle East despite the fact that it didn’t happen and is never going to happen. Liberals were actually lying when they said they wanted to win Afghanistan first. Bush obviously knew Afghanistan wasn’t worth winning and so went on to Iraq because that was the more important war that we could have won, but didn’t. It’s just that both Bush and Coulter both forgot to mention that the Afghanistan war they were also cheerleading was pointless and a waste of lives and money.

She then says, “endless bipartisan investigations” proved Saddam “was attempting to build nuclear weapons (according to endless bipartisan investigations in this country and in Britain — thanks, liberals!)”

Really? After all this time she still believes that?? What happened to them then?

The Niger uranium forgeries was proven false by Wilson and Plame before the war started.

As for the aluminum tubes, FactCheck says:

The document also said “most” US intelligence agencies believed that some high-strength aluminum tubes that Iraq had purchased were intended for use in centrifuge rotors used to enrich uranium, and were “compelling evidence” that Saddam had put his nuclear weapons program back together.

On the matter of the tubes, however, the report noted that there was some dissent within the intelligence community. Members of Congress could have read on page 6 of the report that the Department of Energy “assesses that the tubes are probably not” part of a nuclear program.

The article continues by saying that despite the evidence, it was still generally believed that Saddam was making a nuclear weapon, but does not give any reason to support those beliefs.

In another article, called “MSNBC Swears to Allah that Obama is Not a Muslim,” Coulter writes:

Evidence for the Proposition That Obama’s a Muslim: His father was a Muslim; his mother, an atheist, married two Muslims; he attended a Muslim school in Indonesia from age 6 to 10; and, during the campaign, he proudly posted on his webpage his statement that America is “no longer” a Christian nation, a statement he has repeated as president, while announcing on French TV that America is “one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.”

Evidence for the Proposition That Republicans Are Racist: (Nothing so far.)

So Obama being a Muslim is perfectly reasonable? Why? Because the father he never met was a Muslim (not true — he was Agnostic/Atheist), and his mother was… an Atheist? Since when is Atheism equivalent to Islam? I guess that’s just the Right’s typical categorization process of putting everything bad on the Left. Also, the school he attended was secular, not Islamic, but even if it was, who would otherwise believe that Obama decided to covert to Islam at 10 years old based on that?

Factcheck shows Obama’s site said America was no longer just a Christian nation: “Whatever we once were, we are no longer a Christian nation – at least, not just. We are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, and a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.”

Actually, despite the defense, Coulter believes Obama is an atheist because “It is a fact that any non-retarded person (thank you, Rahm Emanuel!) sitting in the Rev. Wright’s church for 20 minutes, much less 20 years, does not believe in God” and “All liberals are atheists. Only the ones who have to stand for election even bother pretending to believe in God. ”

Politifact also pointed out a shrewd mode of comparison in saying “There have been more terrorist attacks on U.S. soil by … Muslims in Obama’s first 18 months in office than in the six years under Bush after he invaded Iraq.” As always, 9/11 doesn’t count.

Another statement is that while Coulter can’t make a direct link from Liberal’s “high” tax policy to the desire for murder, she can make a direct link between their environmentalism to “trying to kill humans.” Well, I guess not connecting taxes to a hatred of mankind shows some amount of reasonableness, but do we have to applaud the Right every time they add a short “the sky is blue” comment at the end of their “green is red” diatribe?

The only reason anyone cares about what Ann Coulter thinks is because she made a name for herself on Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect. The same is true for Laura Ingraham and Christine O’Donnell. Of course Bill Maher can never become as popular as the conservative chicks he gives microphones to because his ideas are too “extreme” for the “Liberal Media.” Yes, it’s amazing that someone known for extreme right-wing views amazingly acknowledged that Obama’s birth certificate actually does exist, but she never used that known fact to write against her own party’s tactics and has otherwise endorsed every other right-wing lie (“Environmentalists hate mankind”), will smear Democrats with lies she doesn’t really believe (“Obama is a Muslim” in one article; “Obama is an Atheist” in another), will stretch the facts to make her case (“Terrorism increased with Obama”), and parrots every other crazy, redundant idea floating around in the tea parties.

All Apologies

With the Iraq War draws down, there’s been an increase in the “Nobody Could Have Known” excuse.

In contrast to these half-hearted attempts at ass-covering, Andrew Sullivan wrote a far-more honest and reconciling piece in 2008 describing what he got wrong in supporting Bush on the Iraq War.

In response, John Cole of Balloon Juice gave an even more heavy-handed self-criticism.

And today Washington Post opinion writer Matt Miller also wrote a piece called “My Iraq Mistake.”

Turns out 10% of the reconstruction costs of Iraq were wasted.

Tony Blair is “desperately sorry” over the deaths in Iraq but still maintains removing Saddam was the right thing to do.

And Castro apologizes for persecuting gays back in 50s, 60s, and 70s.

Speaking of which, former RNC Chair Ken Mehlman recently came out as gay and now wants to support gay marriage. Good for him. Unfortunately, he was also a campaign manager during the 2004 election when the Republicans were cynically calling for a Constitutional Amendment to define marriage, using the fear of gay marriage to get elected, after which they immediately switched their focus to privatizing social security.

Mehlman acknowledges that if he had publicly declared his sexuality sooner, he might have played a role in keeping the party from pushing an anti-gay agenda.

When asked about this, Mehlman gave a kind of pseudo-apology:

“It’s a legitimate question and one I understand,” Mehlman said. “I can’t change the fact that I wasn’t in this place personally when I was in politics, and I genuinely regret that. It was very hard, personally.” He asks of those who doubt his sincerity: “If they can’t offer support, at least offer understanding.” He also claims that in private conversations with senior Republicans, he fought back against attempts to demonize same-sex marriage.

Melhman says his homosexual identity is something he just realized fairly recently and that he “really wished” he had come to terms with his sexual orientation earlier, so he could have worked against the Federal Marriage Amendment and “reached out to the gay community in the way I reached out to African Americans.”

That’s funny, because Bill Maher outed him on Larry King Live as far back as 2006, a segment that was immediately censored by CNN. Melhman was also the subject of an outing campaign by gay rights activist Mike Rogers, starting when Mehlman was Bush’s campaign manager. I guess everyone knew it but him.

But as Jon Stewart joked, “You can’t expect him to fight for the rights of a group he didn’t know he was a part of!”

The Onion put out this ‘quote’: “It was worth orchestrating the 2004 gay marriage debate if it got him out of overcomitting to his boyfriend.”

Taliban: “The more mosques you stop, the more jihadis we will get”

Just in case anyone thought that the Taliban or al-Qaida doesn’t really care about the mosque issue, a Newsweek article gives us this quote:

“By preventing this mosque from being built, America is doing us a big favor,” Taliban operative Zabihullah tells NEWSWEEK. (Like many Afghans, he uses a single name.) “It’s providing us with more recruits, donations, and popular support.”

“We received many e-mails asking for advice on how Muslims should react to the hijab ban, and how they can punish France.”) This time the target is America itself. “We are getting even more messages of support and solidarity on the mosque issue and questions about how to fight back against this outrage.”

Zabihullah also claims that the issue is such a propaganda windfall—so tailor-made to show how “anti-Islamic” America is—that it now heads the list of talking points in Taliban meetings with fighters, villagers, and potential recruits. “We talk about how America tortures with waterboarding, about the cruel confinement of Muslims in wire cages in Guantánamo, about the killing of innocent women and children in air attacks—and now America gives us another gift with its street protests to prevent a mosque from being built in New York,” Zabihullah says. “Showing reality always makes the best propaganda.”

I’m sure the Taliban will be ecstatic to hear that we’re also burning mosques now.

Oh, and we’ve all heard about how the polls for the number of Americans who believe Obama is a Muslim are rising. Huffington Post did something like I did earlier and compares this number to other crazy beliefs accepted by some 1 in 5 Americans.

Most people would put two and two together and assume this rise reflects the growing anti-Islamic fervor surrounding the very successful fake mosque controversy. Kevin Drum at Mother Jones shows that the increase is almost completely with Republicans who are more highly educated (and therefore watch more Conservative-based news).

But Glenn Beck says it’s Obama’s fault. He says he doesn’t think that people believe that because, as the Left thinks, “Americans are just stupid, ignorant, or racist.” No, they aren’t stupid, just “confused.” Thanks Beck, that’s so much nicer.

So why they are they “confused”? It’s because Obama didn’t bring the kind of change they thought. He’s a Christian but it just isn’t the Christianity anyone recognizes. Obama supposedly bashed America’s arrogance towards Europe during his “apology tour” and so I guess apologizing is inherently Muslim or something. Oh, and Obama said he “submitted to God’s will,” and submission is Islam.

In that case, Beck will be shocked to find out that he and all Mormons are in fact Muslim since, as the Book of Mormon says, people must be “willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict” (Mosiah 3:19).

Here’s the proof Beck gives: The people who took the poll say they got the information regarding Obama’s religion from: 16% television, 7% internet, 6% newspapers, 3% magazines, and 11% from his behavior.

That’s it. One in ten people claim to base their opinions on Obama’s words and deeds, and to Beck that’s proof it’s Obama’s fault.

But wait, add those up and it’s only 43%! Well, Beck forgot to mention that “Media or News” was 36%, and all together, the media constitutes 60%.

So let’s break this down: 60% of people who think he’s a Muslim because of what they got from the media and 11% claim they got the idea from something Obama actually himself said or did, and this proves it’s Obama’s fault. After all, it’s only a 6-to-1 ratio! (or 3-to-1 if you accepted Beck at his word.) I guess Americans are stupid only when they accept false beliefs based on propaganda over actual words and deeds to a 15-to-1 ratio.