goofballs

I wanted to quickly quote this letter from the comments on a Glenn Greenwald post from earlier this week: I am a Jew who has had the opportunity to live and work in Israel. God, I hope that the people who read Lieberman's garbage do not think it represents the thinking of any but the most minute fringe in Israel. I never met anybody in Israel who believed this sort of junk. Lieberman is a sick, perverted man with no sense of honor or decency. When he says things like this, he speaks neither for the Israeli government nor for the Israeli people. -- Carl from L.A. The letter is in response to a post by Greenwald in which Greenwald dissects the strange bedfellows of AIPAC activist and cheerleader Joe Leiberman (I-CT) and frothing-at-the-mouth Rapture lunatic Reverend Hagee. I commented on this earlier this week in the LJ Atheist Community here: http://community.livejournal.com/atheist/1445891.html . My point being, I know that not all Israelis are evil Zionists, rabid L...

Here is an edifying bit on Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi National Congress' now thoroughly shamed (but illogically non-imprisoned) neocon go-to guy for pre-war dirty work. In 1996, the CIA was trying to organize a serious attempt to overthrow Saddam using the INA, headed by a former Saddam hit man, Iyad Allawi who had broken with Saddam and walked in to work for MI-6 in the late 1970s. The Brits eventually brought him to the CIA in 1992. Allawi had assets inside Saddam's military but Chalabi betrayed the coup out of jealousy. The INA was the preferred CIA instrument, its intelligence was being checked out by technical means, and its success would have meant the end of Chalabi's funding. In any case, Chalabi got caught fabricating information and the CIA cut him off. He merely went to the Pentagon and the checks kept coming because his fabricated intelligence on Iraq's WMD was so essential to selling the war, this from a man who had already failed four CIA polygraphs so that...

On this week's Bill Moyers Journal, a montage of young, college aged Republicans show each of them, in lockstep, answering the question of why we are fighting in Iraq with the Party Line of "We Are Fighting Them Over There So We Won't Be Fighting Them Over Here." Nevermind "they" being al Qaeda represents a small minority of the armed insurgents "we" are fighting in Iraq, who is "we" anyway? Well, "we" is not the hawkish youngsters polled by the reporter in the segment: each young adult who had said they favored our continued presence in Iraq, one by one, listed off excuse after excuse as to why they were not serving in Iraq. Only one claimed to have a medical issue, the rest were fit, coiffed, healthy men and women, ages from 19 to 25. Perhaps they were afraid that their hair would get ruffled.