One thing I'll give the far right credit for; they're remarkably predictable. Predictably wrong, yes, but predictable. You know what they're going to say well before they say it. You also know it's going to be dumb, but that every idiot right-winger out there will repeat it until it almost develops an air of legitimacy. There aren't a lot of original ideas coming out of that ideology, but there are a lot of lies.
What am I getting at? Who knows? But local radio dickbag Chuck Morse has a new blog post up that you could have seen coming a mile away.
It's not really worth following that link, because most of his post is misdirection, but here's the opening paragraph from the charmingly titled "Iran Report echoes American approach to the Nazi Holocaust":
Israel government minister Yitzhak Cohen, responding to the US Intelligence report concluding that Iran’s nuclear weapons program was shut down in 2003 stated: “The manner in which the Americans relate to the intelligence report on Iran is similar to the way in which they viewed reports they received during the Holocaust on railways transporting hundreds of thousands of Jews to their death at Auschwitz," [sic]Well, if Israel says something, it must be true, right? They never do anything bad!
After that paragraph Morse goes on to babble about Nazis and ignore the whole issue of Iran. I suspect Morse has never heard of Godwin's Law or Reductio ad Hitlerum, but he pretty much embodies both of them. The man loves a good (and by good I mean logically fallacious) Nazi analogy!
Because that's the whole post. He doesn't really make any arguments about Iran, he just quotes shit about Nazi Germany and expects his readers to jump to the conclusion that Iran is the same thing because of his headline. Which is dumb.
Morse's only real mention of Iran boils down to this:
Author Kenneth Timmerman claims that Thomas Fingar, the chairman of the National Intelligence Council which issued the report, harbors political motives for publishing what his sources in the Middle East call “a deliberate disinformation campaign” cooked up by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, who laundered fake information and fed it to the United States through Revolutionary Guards posing as diplomats in Europe.Oh, so it isn't Morse's idea at all. It's Ken Timmerman's! Timmerman, by the way has an awesome web site. I love the banner at the top and the horrible flashing things everywhere! Also the lack of any evidence for his delusional claims!
Anyway, the basic idea here is that people who are set on invading Iran are unhappy about the NIE report that indicates that "Iran halted work toward a nuclear weapon under international scrutiny in 2003 and is unlikely to be able to produce enough enriched uranium for a bomb until 2010 to 2015."
Oh, that sounds like good news to me! But it's bad news to the warmongering right, because it means they don't have a good excuse for invading Iran.
Mind you, if the report said "OMG Iran is totally going to bomb us tomorrow!" these same people would be cumming in their pants. But since it didn't their only recourse is to try to discredit it. Shame they didn't do that with the totally crap reports about Iraq's make-believe WMD program, but it's not like they're actually interested in the truth in either case. They just need a way to push their agenda and this NIE makes that harder.
Now, the parallel I've just made between the intelligence on Iran and the intelligence on Iraq is a totally obvious and relevant one to make. I think any half-conscious follower of politics would make the same one.
Morse doesn't. He sees some parallel with Nazis. I mean, everyone knows Nazis were bad, so obviously if there's a parallel then it means that this report must be bad too, right?
To quote Dickbag:
In April 1944, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler escaped from Auschwitz and subsequently issued a report in which they estimated that the number of Jews killed in Auschwitz between June 1942 and April 1944 was about 1.75 million.Incidentally, that report actually was wrong. Current estimates put the total number of people killed at Auschwitz at about 1.1 million, 90% of them Jewish. Still a horrible thing of course, but facts are facts...
Morse goes on to babble about history and how we really should have done something about Auschwitz when we heard this report (which I'd agree with in theory, but I'm hardly an expert on WWII-era military tactics), and blames it on this dude McCloy. He closes with:
McCloy's motives in ignoring and in covering up the Nazi genocide are not known, nor are the motives of State Department official Thomas Finger and his coterie in their present attempt to obscure what appears to be a program by another genocidal leader to build an instrument of mass death, to be used against the Jews.Whuh?
Let me put Morse's argument (if you can call it that) in a nutshell here.
- When the US got intelligence about Auschwitz in WWII it should have acted on it.
- The US just got intelligence about Iran saying it's not the nuclear threat we've been led to believe.
- Because of 1), we should ignore 2) and bomb the fuck out of Iran.
- QED
Okay, maybe that's not fair. I left out Morse's number 2.5: "The people who made the Iran NIE are big liar-pants, because some crackpot says so!" But what the fuck does that have to do with Nazis? Oh, nothing! What does it have to do with reality? Also nothing! What does it have to do with pushing an agenda no matter what the truth is? A whole lot!
I don't know if the NIE is right or wrong. Nor does Morse. Nor does anybody except the people running (or not running) the nuclear programs in Iran.
What I do know is that when you get down to it, neither Morse nor any of these other right-wing warmongers really give a shit if the NIE is right or wrong. They want to bomb Iran, and no amount of evidence suggesting that's a bad idea is going to change their minds.
Oh, and Nazis were bad.
4 comments:
Sometimes bartenders will tell stories about how tedious a certain customer was as he told a really boring story in a really boring way. Invariably, their story is tedious as well.
Just something I thought of.
Wow. That's fascinating.
I suppose the report on Iran ending its nuclear bomb program should be just accepted without looking into the methods and possible motives of the authors. A rather rosy-colored glasses look at current events.
Of course not. Everything should be looked at with scrutiny.
People far more qualified than either you or I have looked at it. I haven't heard a lot of compelling arguments that it's factually wrong.
I've just heard the bullshit argument that the guy behind it doesn't like Bush, which means absolutely nothing. You don't have to like your boss to do your job well.
The attempts to discredit it are made not on its own merits, but on the absurd belief that not liking Bush somehow equates to not wanting to provide accurate intelligence about Iran.
Guess what? Some things transcend petty politics. Everyone wants accurate intelligence on Iran's nuclear program.
If you want to provide some sort of valid argument as to why the report is wrong, go for it. But suggesting that it should be discarded because the guy behind it doesn't like Bush is stupid.
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