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Deep
Throat Returns: |
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Mad Hatters and March Hares: Read All About It!! 16 December 2002
Circular logic can be a lot of fun. It’s all about making a conclusion based on material that has already been assumed in the argument. But sometimes it’s more like a Mad Hatter’s Tea Party around here!
All the places are all laid out, but there is “No room! No room!” for honest professionals – and the handful of “invited” politicos making all the strategy and policy sit clustered at the far, far neoconservative right of the table.
“Have a smallpox vaccination,” the Mad Hatter says. “Oh my,” said Alice, “Is there a known threat?”
“Really, there isn’t any!” said the March Hare.
“Then it wasn't very civil of you to offer it,” said Alice angrily.
While you can’t get smallpox from the live virus in the vaccine, some of the results of the President’s immunization program will be fear-provoking, unintended, and highly uncivil. We are a lot more urban, more mobile, and more HIV-positive than we were 40 years ago and it matters.
Some intelligence to go along with the injections would be nice. Especially considering the DoD and USG track record on medicating soldiers first, then providing VA health care and accountability later, often decades later. But if there is no “threat,” as the March Hare well knows, when you ask for intelligence, the response is, with an encouraging tone, “Have some wine!”
This theme continues. I asked a friend in the Pentagon “special projects” in-crowd why the Prez doesn’t do his credibility rating a big favor and share an actual fact or two supporting his claim that Saddam is fibbing in the 12,000 page report or that Saddam is actively working with al Qaeda.
I suggested to him that instead of leaking BS to the press, we might leak something like, “…on page 1027, fourth paragraph, we have proof that you are a lying sonofabitch, here’s the picture or recording or statement or evidence. Nanananananaa!”
My friend told me “It’s just too sensitive to share.”
With all the leaked “intelligence” to the major media outlets regarding things like the discredited report of Iraq selling VX gas to al Qaeda, we ought to be able to leak something that is actually true. Then the rest of the world can see that this war mongering is really just about American compassion and values. You know, our genuinely warm feelings toward the long-suffering Iraqi people.
Commenting on the VX story, with logic nice and circular, Mr. Rumsfeld says while the report is not verified, the possibility of such a VX sale “should come as no surprise.”
I guess there is no point in sharing real facts, when we can introduce creative assumptions, and then refer to them later as facts.
It never stops! Today’s Defenselink’s main story is “Iraq’s Bio Weapons Program Larger Threat Today than in 1991.” Wow – this looks interesting! Until you read and find out all of the “facts” are repetitive assertions by “an [unnamed] U.S. intelligence official.” No organization is claimed, CIA, DIA, or even the new DoD Intelligence czar who hasn’t set up shop yet – or has he?
The article concludes with “the official” saying that a “‘smoking gun’ is BESIDE THE POINT. U.S. officials are SURE Iraq has ILLEGALLY imported the chemicals needed to make nerve agents.” Bomb now, I might add, before spring and summer and next year’s election cycle!!
Misinformed nitwits with anti-republican ideologies and gnat-sized accountabilities like Perle, Krauthammer, Kristol and Hannity are a key part of this explosion of circular logic. They are all sure you don’t need a smoking gun – or that wasted space between your ears, for that matter! Trust them.
Lewis Carroll wrote imaginative stories for children that contain wild insanity as well as truth and wisdom.
I guess when you grow up and work in the Pentagon, you move on to other fun authors with a gift for imagery. Like Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels who wrote, “Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play.”
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