Right Wing Nut House

Last weekend, my little Illinois town celebrated it’s “Founders Days,” featuring a parade, fireworks, flea market, and of course, a carnival.

One of my favorite carnival games is the target shooting game with ducks all lined up in a row. The object being to knock down as many ducks as possible in a set period of time. As a kid, those guns were pellet guns and each time you hit a target there was a satisfying thwack as the hapless duck was plunked and went down for the count. Of course, today they use lasers instead of pellets which casts suspicion on whether or not they’re rigging the game to keep the contestant from winning the nicer prizes.

That said, I miss that thwack. There must be an atavistic response programmed in the human brain that releases massive amounts of endorphins when the target goes down after a hit. I can imagine Paleolithic man casting a spear and getting enormous satisfaction out of the sound made when the point penetrates the heart of his prey. Thousands of years of evolution haven’t dimmed that enjoyment. Just look at the ducks we’ve lined up for you in this week’s Carnival.

We’ve got the easy targets like Jane Fonda, Jimmy Carter, Howard Dean, and the usual suspects. But then we’ve got those third level targets who are much harder to hit like network TV executives, Harvard Regency Board member Conrad Harper, and former London Times editor Simon Jenkins. Extra points should be awarded to those posters who go above and beyond to seek out the truly clueless.

With that in mind, here’s this week’s edition of thwacked ducks.

At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.
(Aldous Huxley)
Hey Aldo! I see you’ve met Howard Dean.
(Me)

Blogeditrix (wouldn’t you love to see her in a black patent leather one piece?) and world traveler Pamela of Atlas Shrugs is back from Paris just in time to tell us about the cluebats at the EU falling all over each other, lining up to sell the radioactive mullahs nuclear fuel. Here’s some gasoline…how about a match.

Giacomo from Joust the Facts has some lefty reactions to the recess appointment of John Bolton. They seem a might upset. Sometimes I think Bush does stuff like this to watch the moonbats as their heads explode.

Hypnyx at Global Democratic Revolution takes on perhaps the most clueless group of Republicans around; my own Illinois State Republican Party who, not content with picking a Senate candidate (Alan Keyes) who lost by nearly 50 points to Barak Obama, now offer a bounty for anyone with info that will convict Chicago Mayor Richard Daley of a crime…in Chicago…on this planet. Not. A. Chance.

Tom Bowler at Libertarian Leanings has some interesting information about Air America. Not only do they rob from the poor to finance their broadcasts, they also have a “Camp Air America” - a liberal “Madrassa” as Tom calls it.

My old buddy Pat at Brainsters has Part #55 of his series of posts fisking the “Reality Based Community.” This one has the moonbats tying in an “impeachment march” with the massive anti-war demonstration set for September 24 in Washington. Wishful thinking is their strong suit.

Raven at And Rightly So says that Jimmy Carter embarrasses her. Since the lovely and talented blogger is not known as the shy and retiring type, the grinning goober must have done something really clueless - like diss the US on foreign soil.

Beth at My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy hates hippies. I’m not surprised. The mentally challenged moonbats at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) have now compared human beings keeping animals to slavery. Maybe they’ll be able to find a chicken who can give the Gettysburg Address.

More great stuff from Mr. Right at The Right Place. Anyone for an Air America telethon? Maybe Al Gore will lend a hand as Mr. Right suggests?

The Logical Meme has an excellent post on Pakistani immigration to Great Britain. “Islam, like Marxism, provides a convenient rationale to the most dysfunctional cultures of the world.” Amen.

Is there anything more despicable than Cafepress selling “Kill Bush” merchandise? Cao at Cao’s Blog (pronounced “Key”) doesn’t think so. Who’s worse? The people who sell it or the people who buy it?

Philomathean writes about the trouble Harvard President Larry Summers is in with various moonbats on campus, including Conrad Harper, the only black member of the Harvard Board of Regents.

The People’s Republic of Seabrook has a few well deserved unkind words for ex-Cubs current Astros broadcaster Milo Hamilton. Baseball is the simplest of games. Why do people want to complicate it so?

Charleston Daily Mail columnist Don Surber has the inside scoop on the new ABC drama “Hail to the Chief.” Evidently the movie industry isn’t the only part of Hollywood that recycles ideas from time to time.

Searchlight Crusade has some well chosen words for the Washington Post and their apparent opposition to a media exemption for bloggers who they say “want it both ways.” “As opposed to traditional media people, who are never activist, never donate to partisan causes, and never, ever encourage others to do so?” Uh-Huh.

Josh Cohen is mad at the MSM for forgetting that the Russians also have a space program and a good one. Where would we have been if the Russkies hadn’t stepped in and saved our bacon by resupplying that boondoggle of a space station we’ve got up there?

Harvey at Bad Example has an open Letter to Jane Fonda. It’s not pretty.

Howard Dean is in the news again and Van Helsing has captured the creature and has him caged in his castle in Transylvania. Funny that he only drinks the blood of Republicans…

Mean ‘ole Meany is being really, really mean to the Splodeydopes again. This time, he responds to an email from a moonbat who wants to secede and set up a country made up of blue states. Meany shows her the error of her ways.

Mark Coffey’s Weekly Jackass is Simon Jenkins, former editor of the London Times and, as Mark refers to him, a “useful idiot” in the war on terror. The fact that he appears regularly on Arianna Huffington’s blog should tell you all you need to know about what kind of an “idiot” he is.

Going to the Mat has a post wrestling Senator Chris Dodd to the mat for his total cluelessness of the US Constitution. I’d have to say the match goes to Matt in three falls.

Jay at Stop the ACLU informs us that the group wants to get rid of tax exempt status for churches. What’s next? Banning hot dogs? Passing a law against apple pie?

Tony at More than Loans has a suggestion regarding Jimmy Carter: “Will someone please give this guy a hammer or something shiny to look at to keep him occupied?” And a bib for the drool.

GM Roper has a great article on the cluelessness of the left in general but also the rest of us when it comes to fighting the War on Terror. “Words mean things” says GM. Too bad most of the moonbats try to make words mean something other than what is said.

Ogre thinks that the American people are pretty dense when taken as a group. I actually agree with that to a certain extent. The problem is that the evidence comes from polls which can also show how really clueless pollsters are just by the way they frame a question.

Duncan Avatar at Parrot Check wants the USS Iowa to come to Texas since the anti-military moonbats in San Francisco won’t have her.

The Maryhunter points us to a superb fisking of Arianna Huffington and her cluelessness of ancient history. TMH has a suggestion for why the crone got it so wrong: She ” may have been a little too distracted thinking about the next private plane flight she could beg off of one of her jet-setting friends to have researched a bold claim she made.”

Finally, here’s a little ditty I did on the New York Times calling people who want to see the 9/11 memorial remain about that day’s events and not be made into an anti-American love fest “un-American.”

This article originally appears in The American Thinker

Reading today’s story in the Washington Post by Dafna Linzer about a National Intelligence Estimate for Iran detailing the mad Mullah’s progress toward achieving a nuclear weapon, one could be forgiven for thinking that we’ve been down this road before. The leaking of classified information is, after all, a felony. That doesn’t seem to stop some employees at the CIA from assuming the job of policy makers by leaking information that buttresses their opinion that Iran is not an immediate threat to the United States and that the Administration is once again lying about a potential adversary’s intentions.

The problem is that, as the article points out, only selected portions of the NIE were relayed to the reporter, Ms. Linzer. Is it an accident that those portions that were leaked are at odds with the Administration’s oft stated claims that Iran, if left to its own devices, would be nuclear capable in a matter of a year or two?

In fact, the report predicts that Iran would be unable to build a weapon for ten years, something that would come as a huge surprise to the state of Israel. In an article written by Peter Hirschberg for Ha’aretz, the author quotes an Israeli military official giving a quite different analysis of the threat from Iran:

Israeli intelligence officials estimate that Iran could be capable of producing enriched uranium within six months and have nuclear weapons within two years. Earlier this month, head of Israeli military intelligence Maj. Gen. Aharon Ze’evi said that while Iran was not currently capable of enriching uranium to build a nuclear bomb, “it is only half a year away from achieving such independent capability – if it is not stopped by the West.”

And yet, the Washington Post story says that the consensus estimate of our intelligence community is that Iran would not be capable of producing a bomb for a decade:

The new estimate extends the timeline, judging that Iran will be unlikely to produce a sufficient quantity of highly enriched uranium, the key ingredient for an atomic weapon, before “early to mid-next decade,” according to four sources familiar with that finding. The sources said the shift, based on a better understanding of Iran’s technical limitations, puts the timeline closer to 2015 and in line with recently revised British and Israeli figures.

The estimate is for acquisition of fissile material, but there is no firm view expressed on whether Iran would be ready by then with an implosion device, sources said.

The problem with Iran’s “technical limitations” is that the production of Highly Enriched (HE) uranium is not a huge technical problem to overcome. Hiding the process from prying eyes is the real dilemma. The two practical ways to separate U-235 (bomb material) from U-238 (uranium hexafluoride or “hex”) are gaseous diffusion and centrifuges. A gaseous diffusion plant would be impossible to hide given how big the works would have to be to efficiently separate the uranium. The centrifuge method is much easier to conceal but a bigger technical challenge given the engineering tolerances necessary to spin the centrifuge at the enormous speeds in order to separate the isotopes.

There is a third way and would in fact be a shortcut to a nuclear weapon; acquire the material from a third party. The article doesn’t say whether or not the NIE deals with that possibility.

As for constructing an “implosion” device, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was constructed using the so called “gun design” where a sphere of U-235 sits at one end of a barrel and a smaller pellet of the material is fired into it thus achieving critical mass and detonating the bomb. This is less efficient than an implosion device but still packs a huge wallop.

The point I’m trying to make is that given the piecemeal release of parts of the NIE, the leaker has succeeded in spinning the Iran nuclear story toward a conclusion at odds with what the Administration has been saying since at least 2002 - that Iran must be prevented from enriching uranium because of how close they are to constructing a nuclear device.

Evidently, part of the Administration’s concern was that the Iranian military had its own nuclear program separate from the civilian government:

Sources said the new timeline also reflects a fading of suspicions that Iran’s military has been running its own separate and covert enrichment effort. But there is evidence of clandestine military work on missiles and centrifuge research and development that could be linked to a nuclear program, four sources said.

Suspicions are “fading” but there is “evidence” of clandestine military work on centrifuges? It appears that either we have someone wanting to cover all bases at the same time or we have no consensus in our intelligence community on the issue. If this is the case, how can the estimate of Iranian capabilities be taken seriously? Is there another estimate at odds with the conclusion leaked in the article?

We don’t know which is why the leaking of this NIE should be seen in the context of the continuing war being waged by a faction at the CIA on the White House. Is it an accident that much of the information leaked confirms what one former CIA agent has been saying about Iran since at least March?

Ray McGovern is on the steering committee for the radical group of ex-CIA agents at war with the White House known as Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). Here’s what Mr. McGovern had to say in an article for Tom Paine, an on-line leftist magazine:

Let’s look briefly at the scariest rationale-If Iran is allowed to produce fissile material, it may transfer it to terrorists bent on exploding a nuclear device in an American city.

This seems to be the main boogeyman, whether real or contrived, in U.S. policymaking councils. Its unexamined premise-the flimsily supported but strongly held view that Iran’s leaders would give terrorists a nuclear device or the wherewithal to make one-is being promoted as revealed truth. Serious analysts who voice skepticism about this and who list the strong disincentives to such a step by Iran are regarded as apostates.

For those of you with a sense of deja vu, we have indeed been here before-just a few years ago. And the experience should have been instructive. In the case of Iraq, CIA and other analysts strongly resisted the notion that Saddam Hussein would risk providing nuclear, chemical, or biological materials to al-Qaeda or other terrorists-except as a desperate gesture if and when he had his back to the wall. Similarly, it strains credulity beyond the breaking point to posit that the Iranian leaders would give up control of such material to terrorists.

Since Mr. McGovern wrote that article in March, Iran’s ruling Guardian Council has by most accounts rigged an election so that a hard line militarist with close ties to terrorist groups was elected President. Even before President elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has taken office, a crackdown on dissidents as well as an ideological purge of key government and civil institutions has been underway in Iran. And President elect Ahmadinejad has made it clear that he sees the Islamic revolution as a worldwide phenomena that will conquer “every mountaintop.”

Now, we can choose to believe what we read and what we see or we can listen to the very same people were saying in July of 2001 that al Qaeda was not a threat. And let’s not forget most of these same analysts concurred in the estimates regarding Iraqi WMD.

The point is that regardless of recent steps to reform our intelligence capability, it appears that we’re still working with a dysfunctional system where agency personnel feel perfectly comfortable with leaking classified information in a bid to influence both Administration policy and the political process. No one expects everybody to agree on everything. But the American people have a right to expect that the unelected bureaucrats who work at the CIA allow policy making to reside with those we have entrusted for the task - the elected representatives of the people.

UPDATE

Wizbang has a “Shut your Piehole” edition of the 10 Spot. I can’t think of any better candidate than the idiots at the CIA who keep blabbing our national security secrets.

In a recent essay in the New York Times Book Review Alan Ehrenhalt, executive editor of Governing magazine and author of ”The United States of Ambition’,’ asked Why do people hate Bill Clinton?

Millions of Americans despise Bill Clinton. They have done so since he became a presence in national politics in the early 1990’s, and they continue to do so today, more than four years after his retirement from public office.

The passion of the Clinton haters is a phenomenon without equal in recent American politics. It is not based on any specific policies that Clinton promoted or implemented during his years in office. It is almost entirely personal. In its persistence and intensity, it goes far beyond anything that comparable numbers of people have felt about Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan or either of the presidents Bush. It surpasses even the liberals’ longstanding detestation of Richard Nixon. The only political obsession comparable to it in the past century is the hatred that a significant minority of Americans felt for Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

In this respect the phenomenon is all the more puzzling. Roosevelt made enormous and sometimes reckless changes in the American government and economy, and when his critics loathed him for it, he loathed them back. ”They are unanimous in their hate for me” he said of them in his 1936 re-election campaign, ”and I welcome their hatred.” Clinton, on the other hand, was a centrist who undertook no dramatic transformations of society or government and, what was more, showed himself to be an instinctive conciliator who believed in compromise almost to a fault.

Mr. Erhrenhalt needs to get a clue.

Anyone who thinks that Bill Clinton is hated more by the right than George Bush 43 is hated by the left has either been asleep since 2001 or is such a Bush hater himself that he’s lost all perspective in gauging the depth of feeling generated by the left against the President.

I don’t recall too many right wingers comparing Clinton to Hitler, or openly calling for his assassination, or accusing him falsely of being behind a plot to rig voting machines to steal an election, or any of a number of stupid, ignorant, hateful themes that have vomited forth from leftists for the last five years.

And Mr. Ehrenhalt calling Mr. Clinton a “centrist” is like me calling a my pet cat Snowball a rhinoceros - it sounds good but it simply isn’t so.

Be that as it may, Richard Jensen who runs Conservative net, a forum for conservative and libertarian scholars, asked a few of his contributors to respond to Mr. Ehrenhalt’s ludicrous description of Clinton as well as answering his question.

David Horowitz (Editor of Frontpage Magazine)

This is an interesting review, but I strongly demur from the view that Clinton hatred exceeds Bush hatred by any measure. Conservatives are more disgusted by Clinton; but they are not so blinded by their negative feelings that they don’t appreciate Clinton’s achievements, the centrism of his policy (when he wasn’t surrendering his better judgment to interest groups), his brilliance as a politician. By contrast so-called liberals and leftists have a hatred of Bush that is so intense it reduces their view of him to absurdities — he’s a moron, a liar and evil. None of these are remotely related to any truth of the man or his presidency and the passion of belief in them is so strong that obscures any appreciation for his achievements in the war on terror and foreign policy generally which far surpass anything Clinton was able to do.

Mr. Horwitz obviously never traversed the fever swamps of the right because Clinton indeed is thought of by many as a liar and evil. And my own belief is that Clinton’s “brilliance” as a politician is due to the total lack of anyone with charisma who opposed him on the right. Once Bush41 was out of the way, the Republicans had no one of any stature to oppose him. Newt Gingrich was too cerebral. Bob Dole was….well, a highly decorated war hero but a tired old warhorse by ‘96. In short, even a dim bulb casts some light compared to no bulb at all.

Larry Schweikart (Professor of History, Dayton University)

As one who despised Clinton for what he did to the office of the presidency—in my view, every bit as dangerous and abusive as Nixon—it was always clear that Clinton would, in the end, do what the public wanted. (That was not so clear about She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named). I didn’t “hate” Clinton so much as pitied him—the product of an alcohol-abusive family that learned how to please everyone, that wanted everyone to like him, thus one who developed no core beliefs of his own (exactly what Stephanopolous, I think, said).

The notion of “getting” Clinton was less an opposition to his policies, which, as David points out, were at times “conservative” (balanced budgets, NAFTA), but more a dogmatic demand that the law be followed because not to follow it would invite further, more egregious violations from Clinton and his wife. Thankfully, the impeachment neutered him, killed Al Gore’s chances, and destroyed his “legacy.” Bush hatred, though, as I have said here on numerous occasions, is essentially religious in nature. Most of all, the Bush-haters fear Bush’s certainty of purpose which is given him by God. “No one can be that sure of himself,” they mourn. Well, yes, one can.

Even before Monica, there was a sense that the Oval Office was an unclean place; that the White House was not only for sale to the highest campaign contributors but that the reverence that most President’s show toward the traditions of the office was simply missing from the Clinton mafia. The venality and malfeasance of his aides, his cabinet officials, his wife, and eventually himself was so pervasive that at times it seemed as if a criminal conspiracy had taken over the country.

It wasn’t a conspiracy of course. It was amorality of thought, word, and deed. When Senator Bob Kerry said in a January 1996 article in Esquire magazine that “”Clinton’s an unusually good liar. Unusually good. Do you realize that?” most conservatives shrugged their shoulders. Clinton wasn’t just a liar. He was a pathological fibber, the broncobuster of prevarication, the Muhamad Ali of equivocation. He lied so often, so consistently, and so well that the American people eventually threw up their hands and decided it was just something that all politicians did. That may be true to a certain extent, but the length and breadth of Clinton’s lies exceeded anything done by any other politician in recent memory.

And the good professor is spot on with his analysis of the Bush haters being livid at our President’s certitude. Having spent their entire lives trying to tear down the verities by which western civilization has thrived for nearly 500 years, it must really stick in their throat that they can’t discredit the simple faith of the man.

Paul Gottfried ( Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College and author of, most recently, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt)

Republicans and movement conservatives disliked Clinton because they were genuinely turned off by his personal immorality and even more by the casuistry in which feminist groups engaged in order to justify his predatory sex life. I for one found Clinton to be a shabby clown and the embattled feminists who went to his aid seemed to have about as much credibility as the Communists who defended the Soviet-Nazi Pact.

But, unlike David and Larry, I’m not sure that the attacks on Bush are more personal and more biting than those that Republicans unleashed against Clinton. What bothers me is exactly the opposite, namely that the savaging of W is being done pro forma. It is the way the liberal media and academics and Democrats treat Republican presidents, even those who equivocate on affirmative action and become ultraliberals in dealing with illegal immigration.

The savaging of the President “pro-forma” is an excellent way to describe the put down of every Republican President by the left since the end of WW II. Michael Barone commented on this in a recent article:

But beneath the hubbub, we can see the playing out of another, less reported story: the collapse of the attempts by liberal Democrats and their sympathizers in the mainstream media–the New York Times, etc., etc.–to delegitimize yet another Republican administration.

This project has been ongoing for more than 30 years. Richard Nixon, by obstructing investigation of the Watergate burglary, unwittingly colluded in the successful attempt to besmirch his administration. Less than two years after carrying 49 states, he was compelled to resign. The attempt to delegitimize the Reagan administration seemed at the time reasonably successful. Reagan was widely dismissed as a lightweight ideologue, and the rejection of his nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987 contributed to the impression that his years in office were, to take the title of a book by a first-rate journalist, “the Reagan detour.” As time went on, as the Berlin Wall fell and Bill Clinton proclaimed that the era of big government was over, it became clear that Reagan was a successful transformational president–something the mainstream media grudgingly admitted when he died in 2004 after a decade out of public view.

Barone didn’t mention Eisenhower whose Presidency heralded one of the most prosperous and innovative times in the history of human civilization. Portraying Ike as a grinning idiot was easy for the left because of the way the President mangled the English language. But he was decisive and forward looking in his administration - something the left never gave him credit for.

Yes, there was passionate hatred of Clinton. But it was Republicans and Republican ideas that gave him his greatest legislative victories in welfare reform, NAFTA, and balanced budgets. The fact that he shamelessly stole those ideas and embraced them as his own is what maddened those of us who could see that embrace for what it was; not born out of principal but out of opportunism. That too, is a form of dishonesty. And when you get right down to it, that’s why so many of us hate Clinton to this day; his inability to have an honest set of principals that when you look at the man, you know he believes in.

Bill Clinton would have been an afterthought in history if Ross Perot had not run in 1992. And if the Republicans had been able to field a more attractive candidate in 1996, Clinton would have gone down to a humiliating defeat (he got less than 50% of the vote in both elections).

I will always see him as an interlude President - a between the wars President. He was enabled by a populace who simply wanted to be left alone in the period between the end of the cold war and the start of the War on Terror. And he will be little more than a minor, curious footnote in history volumes discussing the end of the 20th century.

The votes are in and yours truly ended up in the top spot for this week’s Watcher’s vote. My post on the death of James Doohan juxtaposed with the 36th anniversery of Apollo 11 finished in the top spot followed closely by an excellent piece by The Glittering Eye on nuclear terrorism. Finishing in the third spot was newbie New World Man’s post “Roberts Rules.”

In the non Council category Hog on Ice won with a post entitled “Anonymous Rectal Intercourse.” Finishing second was Richard Fernandez at the Belmont Club with his post “And Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep.”

If you’d like to participate in this week’s Watcher’s vote, go here and follow instructions.

When Adolph Hitler was getting ready to invade Poland in August of 1939, he faced something of a dilemma. While he realized that both France and England would probably be forced to declare war on Germany for the violation of Poland’s sovereignty he was planning, his real concern was the reaction of the Soviet Union who had also given some security guarantees to the Polish state.

Hitler did not want to repeat what he saw as the Kaiser’s biggest mistake - Germany having to fight a two front war. And while he was fully prepared to invade Poland at any cost, he thought he saw an opening in late August to peel the Soviets away from the Anglo-French alliance. He sent his Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop to Moscow for what has to be considered the most cynical diplomatic move of the 20th century. Within a few days, Ribbentrop had negotiated a trade agreement on the most favorable terms to Germany along with a Non-Agression pact between the two tyrants. In addition, there was a secret protocol to the treaty that gave Hitler carte blanche to attack in the west and allowed Stalin a free hand in the Baltic. Hitler even threw in a large slice of Poland to sweeten the pot for Stalin.

The Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed on August 29 in Moscow. Less than 72 hours later, Hitler invaded Poland.

The non-agression treaty didn’t save Stalin, of course, as Hitler planned to break the pact just as soon as the military situation in the west was settled. After occupying most of Europe by defeating the French and bringing Great Britain to its knees, he ended up invading the Soviet Union in June of 1941.

Hitler used the non-agression pact with Stalin as a ruse to improve his military prospects in the west and allow him time for the strategic situation to ripen in the east.

And now both Iran and North Korea, the remaining members of the “Axis of Evil”, are saying they’ll give the United States what we want from them - no nukes - in exchange for security guarantees.

Does anyone else get the feeling that history may be repeating itself?

Both countries would be tough nuts to crack in a military sense. Both have large modern armies that would make invasion extremely costly. Only a coalition of Europeans and friendly Arab states would be able to take down Iran. And some similar coalition would be needed to overrun North Korea.

And yet the danger of either one of those nations getting their hands on weapons of mass destruction is so great that there is a sense of urgency in preventing them from achieving their goal. In the case of Iran, we’ve allowed the so-called EU3 composed of Great Britain, France, and Germany to negotiate with the radiocative Mullahs in Iran to stop their uranium enrichment program. Iran has continously refused to do this despite attractive trade concessions offered by the EU. Now apparently, the Iranians may be willing to forgo their enrichment program in exchange for certain “guarantees:”

Iran’s top nuclear negotiator said his European counterparts have proposed a guarantee that Iran will not be invaded if Tehran agrees to permanently halt uranium enrichment, the state-run news agency said Sunday.

Hasan Rowhani said the proposal is being discussed by Europeans and includes several important points such as “guarantees about Iran’s integrity, independence, national sovereignty” and “nonaggression toward Iran,” the Islamic Republic News Agency said Sunday.

“If Europe enjoys a serious political will about Iran’s nuclear fuel cycle, there will be the possibility of understanding,” the agency quoted Rowhani as saying in a letter to outgoing Iranian president Mohammad Khatami.

Does this mean that Iran would halt their drive to produce weapons grade atomic material? Not exactly:

Meanwhile, Iran’s top officials were to meet Sunday evening for a final decision on when to resume work at a reprocessing center in Isfahan, said Ali Agha Mohammadi, spokesman for Iran’s powerful Supreme National Security Council.

“Europe has only a few hours, up to when the council meets, for the proposal. If it does not arrive by that time, the council will discuss breaking the ice” on Iran’s stalled nuclear program, Agha Mohammadi told state-run radio.

Of course, the Iranians will be guided by the principals of non proliferation - for a while anyway:

“Today or tomorrow we will send a letter to the IAEA about resumption of activity in the Isfahan Uranium Conversion Facility,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi. “We would like to unseal the equipment and carry on the activity under the IAEA.”

Asefi said IAEA inspectors already were in Tehran, which means a short flight to the central Iranian city of Isfahan.

“Since our nuclear policy is transparent and legal, we will start activity upon delivering the letter to the IAEA, with the inspectors in attendance,” Asefi said.

Later Sunday, Melissa Fleming, a spokeswoman for the Vienna, Austria-based IAEA, told the AP the agency had not received any official notification from Iran about resumption of activity at the Isfahan facility.

Given the cluelessness of the International Atomic Energy Administration (IAEA) in the past regarding Kim Jung Il’s “now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t” nuclear weapons program, is it any wonder we don’t have much faith in the Iranian statements regarding how benign their enrichment program is?

And speaking of the North Koreans, while the 6 party talks have resumed, Kim has already made it clear that the way to a nuclear free Korean penninsula is a guarantee by the United States not to invade:

Striking a peace treaty to replace the armistice that ended the 1950-1953 Korean War would resolve the nuclear crisis on the Korean peninsula, a spokesman for North Korea’s Foreign Ministry said on Friday.

The comments, carried by the North’s official KCNA news agency, came before a meeting of regional powers in Beijing on Tuesday for talks aimed at dismantling Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons programmes in exchange for security guarantees and economic assistance.

“Replacing the ceasefire mechanism by a peace mechanism on the Korean peninsula would lead to putting an end to the U.S. hostile policy toward the DPRK, which spawned the nuclear issue and the former’s nuclear threat,” a foreign ministry spokesman said in the report carried by KCNA.

According to this very interesting analysis via the Army War College, the North Korean regime is building nukes to ensure its survival but also to prove itself a serious, grown up country that deserves more respect than it’s getting. As soon as they stop saying that Kim wasn’t born but that he “fell from heaven” then I’ll start taking them seriously.

That said, it’s obvious that North Korea too wishes that the United States military not invade. In exchange, they’re willing to forgo building nuclear weapons, sign a peace treaty, and generally act like good little members of the international community.

Or, they plan on lulling the United States and the rest of the world to sleep while they continue to evade the weak efforts of the IAEA to keep the lid on their nuclear program, something they have a lot of experience in doing.

The point here is that both Iran and North Korea have no incentive whatsoever to stop building nukes as long as the rest of the world goes along with their “non-agression” plans. Once the world community turns their backs on Kim and the mad Mullahs, I have no doubt that they plan to resume their weapons programs. In the meantime, the rest of the world gives itself a stiff neck by trying hard to pat itself on the back for it’s work in stopping the “Axis of Evil” from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as well as the ruling Guardian Council by all reports have just fixed a Presidential election so that a handpicked hard line terrorist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could be elected. Recent statements from the President-elect include a promise to carry the Islamic revolution to “every mountaintop” as well as his almost unnoticed campaign to militarize and radicalize the country by placing hard line allies in key positions.

Iran is preparing for a war and wants a treaty of “non-agression?”

The news that Iran will continue with its enrichment program will not sit well with the Israelis who have made it very clear that a nation that has consistently called for its destruction will not be allowed to build an atomic weapon. Nor can we in the United States afford the luxury of allowing a state that openly supports terrorist groups like Hamas and Hizbollah not to mention their demonstrated affection for al Qaeda to build a nuclear weapon that could end up in the hands of terrorists who wouldn’t hesitate using it against us.

The actions taken by Iran in the last few months would seem to indicate that any “non agression” treaty with them would ring as hollow as Hitler’s non agression pact with Russia. The same hold’s true with North Korea. The fact is, neither can be trusted. This is especially true if we’re forced to rely on international organizations like the IAEA to make sure those two nations are keeping their end of any bargain.

Will we delude ourselves about Iran and North Korea the same way that Stalin deluded himself about Hitler’s Germany?

Calling all bloggers!

You have until Monday night at 10:00 PM to get your entries in for this week’s Carnival of the Clueless.

Last week’s was the best yet with 26 entries from both the right and left side of the political spectrum hammering those individuals and groups among us who are truly clueless.

Here’s what we’re looking for:

Each week, I’ll be calling for posts that highlight the total stupidity of a public figure or organization – either left or right – that demonstrates that special kind of cluelessness that only someone’s mother could defend…and maybe not even their mothers!

Everyone knows what I’m talking about. Whether it’s the latest from Bill Maher or the Reverend Dobson, it doesn’t matter. I will post ALL ENTRIES REGARDLESS OF WHETHER I AGREE WITH THE SENTIMENTS EXPRESSED OR NOT..

You can enter by emailing me, leaving a link in the comments section, or by using the handy, easy to use form at Conservative Cat.

As this article in the Washington Post makes clear, there’s probably nothing that can be done to avoid what could turn out to be the most calamitous event in American history; the coming Bird Flu pandemic:

Public health officials preparing to battle what they view as an inevitable influenza pandemic say the world lacks the medical weapons to fight the disease effectively, and will not have them anytime soon.

Public health specialists and manufacturers are working frantically to develop vaccines, drugs, strategies for quarantining and treating the ill, and plans for international cooperation, but these efforts will take years. Meanwhile, the most dangerous strain of influenza to appear in decades — the H5N1 “bird flu” in Asia — is showing up in new populations of birds, and occasionally people, almost by the month, global health officials say.

If the virus were to start spreading in the next year, the world would have only a relative handful of doses of an experimental vaccine to defend against a disease that, history shows, could potentially kill millions. If the vaccine proved effective and every flu vaccine factory in the world started making it, the first doses would not be ready for four months. By then, the pathogen would probably be on every continent.

Am I being an alarmist? Am I overstating the potential for unmitigated disaster?

I wish I was. What the article makes clear and what international health officials have been saying for months is that it is only a matter of time before the strain of flu currently infecting millions of birds mutates into a pathogen not only with the ability to jump from birds to humans, but more catastrophically, a mutation that would enable it to leap from human to human via casual contact.

This would bring about a social and economic catastrophe the likes of which this country has never seen.

Other measures would go well beyond the conventional boundaries of public health: restricting international travel, shutting down transit systems or nationalizing supplies of critical medical equipment, such as surgical masks.

But Osterholm argues that such measures would fall far short. He predicts that a pandemic would cause widespread shutdowns of factories, transportation and other essential industries. To prepare, he says, authorities should identify and stockpile a list of perhaps 100 crucial products and resources that are essential to keep society functioning until the pandemic recedes and the survivors go back to work.

In order to contain the outbreak, the federal government will have to assume enormous powers, ordering the closing of schools, office buildings, factories, malls - anywhere and anyplace that large numbers of people congregate. The simple chore of shopping for food will become a nightmare as strict limits will be placed on the number of people that will be allowed in a store at any one time.

Every time you walk out of your house, you’ll have to think is this trip worth the risk of getting sick?

The strain on the public health system will be overwhelming. Hospitals will be filled to capacity. Workers on the front line of the epidemic - doctors, nurses, and other health care workers - will be hardest hit straining the ability of hospitals to deliver even basic services.

How do we know this? Because the US and the rest of the world went through a flu pandemic before; the Spanish Flu outbreak in 1918. That worldwide calamity killed more than 30 million people, 675,000 in the United States alone. By contrast, on average 36,000 deaths are attributed to flu each year in the United States.

Given the massive change in population density worldwide plus the advent of international air travel the World Health Organization is estimating that a Bird Flu pandemic could kill 300 million worldwide. Even their pie-in-the-sky best case scenario where the world is given another year or two to prepare places the number of dead at 7 million.

We may not have that long.

So what makes this version of the flu any different than the disease that strikes the US every winter?

Pandemic influenza is not an unusually bad version of the flu that appears each winter. Those outbreaks are caused by flu viruses that have been circulating for decades and change slightly year to year.

Pandemics are caused by strains of virus that are highly contagious and to which people have no immunity. Such strains are rare. They arise from the chance scrambling and recombination of an animal flu virus and a human one, resulting in a strain whose molecular identity is wholly new.

The reason Bird Flu has flared up in Asia is because of the close proximity of people and birds. This closeness has been seen throughout history as a prerequisite for viruses making the jump from animals to humans.

What has international health officials especially worried is that this particular flu’s mortality rate doesn’t moderate once it makes the jump to humans. Where the disease might have a mortality rate of 70% in birds, that number would be expected to fall precipitously once making the jump to humans, dropping to less than 10%. The reason is the simple evolutionary strategy of the bug. In order to survive it must keep infecting humans. To do that, it has to keep the host alive long enough to infect someone else. This gives our own body’s defenses time to marshall its immune forces to do battle with the invader.

However, this strain of Bird Flu has shown a 34% mortality rate. And while there’s a chance that figure will go down in any pandemic, compared to the 1-3% mortality of ordinary flu worldwide the numbers would still be catastrophic.

As for the economic effects, there would not be a parallel in American history. The reason goes to the heart of what globalization means to our economy and how economic activity in the United States is truly the engine that drives the economies of the world.

If the kinds of draconian quarantine measures contemplated by the government were initiated, the economy would deflate like a punctured balloon. Even if the CDC were able to contain the epidemic quickly - say, as quickly as a modern industrialized Hong Kong was able to contain the recent SARS outbreak, we’d still be looking at a period of about two months of government mandated reduced economic activity.

What would that mean for the economy?

The only comparable event we have to go on would be the economic impact of 9/11. And while there are as many estimates for that as there are economists, the GAO did a round-up of estimates that would seem to indicate that the attacks cost the US economy upwards of $165 billion in direct costs with a loss of perhaps as many as 175,000 jobs. Indirect costs that are still being felt today could be 3 times that much.

That was one attack in one city. The flu would hit several cities almost simultaneously and cause massive economic dislocation due to the virtual halt in economic activity in those and perhaps most regions of the country. I wouldn’t want to contemplate what that would mean over a two month period but given that imports and exports would be massively affected due to probable restrictions on loading and unloading of ships, I daresay that the entire world would be plunged into an economic nightmare that would overwhelm the ability of most third world government to deal with the crisis.

I really hope I’m wrong in all this. But seeing how the WHO has been scrambling for the last 18 months to try and contain each and every outbreak of human to human contact, I’m not very optimistic. And the CDC is taking the possibility very, very seriously.

As I said back in May when this story first started to percolate, I’m going to keep a close eye on the far east news services. I would suggest you do the same. Given the incompetence of the MSM, by the time they start reporting this story in earnest, the epidemic will be upon us and it will be too late.

I’m also going to make some common sense plans including purchasing a good supply of surgical masks and stock up on canned goods and other non-perishables.

I hope a year from now everyone can call me an old goat who panicked over nothing.

UPDATE

I thought that this would be a story tailor made for the Shadow Media but at the moment, only 9 blogs have linked to the WaPo article.

One of them is Fragments of Floyd:

We (global mankind, science and public health) have not adequately anticipated and prepared for such a scenario, even though we could have seen it coming for a decade or more. If we could turn back time 15 years and know with certainty the pathogens we would face in the future, would there have been any better cooperation between continents? Would we have wasted so much talent, wealth and technology (ostensibly) to protect our people and way of life from acts of terrorism if we’d accepted that it was emerging infectious disease that posed by far the greater threat to our economy and to our very survival?

It seems we may be very near the moment of truth. Is it too late to turn our swords into vaccines?

I don’t buy the argument but he has a point (we would have to face both - there’s no “either, or” - much like our dilemma at the outset of WW II: Germany or Japan?)

His point about cooperation is spot on. Read his post for how that pandemic might be nipped in its infancy with an international pooling of resources.

UPDATE II

It appears that most of the other A-list bloggers don’t find this story worth their time with the exception of Glenn Reynolds, who thinks we should be worried “a bit” and John Cole who at least has the common sense to share a small degree of my concern:

This isn’t going away, it can’t be negotiated, so we better start preparing. Just as a curious side note, the the late night crazies at Art Bell’s Coast to Coast have been fretting about this for years.

What next! Will a Yeti walk out of the woods and show up in a bar in Yakima?

UPDATE 8/1

The Maryhunter has posted his learned and fascinating response here.

Ever since the attacks of September 11, 2001 Americans across the political spectrum have been seeking to “understand” terrorism. We’re very good at this sort of thing. It’s a part of our national character commented on by such diverse intellects as de Tocqueville and Winston Churchill. We are a nation of problem solvers, tinkerers, do-it-yourselfers; we’re good at taking things apart to get at the nub of a problem be it a faulty condenser or where to build a railroad.

What we’re not so good at is “understanding” the motivations underlying human behavior for which most of the evils of this world both past and present can be ascribed. In truth, understanding the nature of evil has not been one of our strong suits. We have either hugely simplified it using “the devil made him do it” explanation or more recently, refused to acknowledge that evil even exists. That doesn’t stop us from trying to catalog, chart, ponder, pontificate on, and generally make an intellectual mess of trying to explain and understand the historical and philosophical forces that are responsible for the connection between modern Islam and terrorism.

The problem is that Islam itself resists such scrutiny. Caught up in a world where the basic tenets of their religion clash with the reality of life confronting its nearly 1 billion adherents, Islam is in need of some serious introspection. The old verities are no longer adequate comfort for young Muslims who see the rapid pace of change in non-Muslim countries and ache to participate in some meaningful way in the adventures available to their 21st century counterparts. This is especially true in Europe where segregated immigrant societies seethe with discontent over being left off the train pulling the engine of progress both in their adopted homeland and back home where their extended families - extremely important in Arab culture - waste away in poverty and bitterness.

For us, it becomes too easy to overgeneralize when looking at Islam as it’s dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. It is this resistance that forms the basis of terrorism.

When talk show host and NRO contributor Michael Graham took a stab at trying to describe this resistance by Islam to modernity by claiming that the religion itself was a terrorist organization, he was fired for his trouble. Mr. Graham had just returned from an emotional first hand look at the War on Terror in Iraq and I wish his detractors would have cut the man some slack for that reason. He was, after all, not saying anything that can’t be found in many comment threads and discussion forums on the net. The fact that he’s a radio talk show host with many thousands of listeners should not have made much of a difference. After all, the great advantage of living in a free society is that when one hears something they disagree strongly enough with on the radio or television, they can switch the infernal machine off or change the channel to something more agreeable.

I do it all the time. Whenever I hear the Reverend Al Sharpeton start talking, I generally either switch off or switch over. Sharpeton’s hate-filled rants appeal to both a certain segment of the African American population as well as the mainstream press. He does not appeal to me. Hence, the Reverend’s rants are cause enough for me to tune him out.

If enough people do that, Mr. Graham then gets fired for poor performance, not for saying what he thinks, even if many believe what he said was wrong. However, in Mr. Graham’s case, his employers - who initially stood by him - eventually caved in to pressure from the professional victimhood society of CAIR. The Council on American Islamic Relations - several members of which have been indicted and convicted for aiding and abetting terrorists - has proven its power with the media many times in the past. The Fox TV show “24″ was actually forced to change a story line so that Muslims wouldn’t be portrayed in a purely negative light. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall in some of these meetings between CAIR and network execs just to see how the terrorist apologists frightened a major network so much that halfway through filming their number one hit series, they changed the plot to accommodate them.

In Mr. Graham’s case, there was an organized attempt to boycott advertisers for the station. This tactic is as American as apple pie and proves that when it comes to apologizing for terrorists, CAIR will even invoke the tactics used by its putative enemy.

What CAIR or any other so-called “moderate” Islamic group cannot do is to refute Mr. Graham’s thesis point by point. To recognize that there is even a discussion about whether Islam itself is the problem would open the door to introspection. And at the present time, this is something that Islamic culture simply is incapable of doing.

It was much the same with the United States regarding the issue of slavery. For four score and seven years, the issue colored politics in the US the same way that terrorism now colors any discussion of Islam. And like our ancestors - both North and South - we couldn’t deal with the fundamental issue that was both the reason and moral justification for slavery; that our Constitution codified it, made it legal, indeed burned it into the soul of the democratic process by assigning a value of 3/5 of a human being to those held in servitude for purposes of Congressional representation. The way that power itself was exercised depended on slavery.

So like a beetle enmeshed in a spider’s web, there simply was no way out. The threads that bound slavery to our political process also precluded any discussion of getting rid of the spider. To do so would open doors to changing too many things. The South had developed both an economy and a culture that wound the spider’s threads so tightly around it that only the radical surgery of civil war could break them. That surgery took almost 100 years to recover from and to this day still colors some of our politics.

So it is with Islam. The spider has woven a web that has enmeshed its adherents in bloody resistance to change both for the religion itself and for the societies where believers live. The justification for the blood can be found in their “Basic Law” of the Koran. Unlike our Constitution which has a process for amendment, the Koran being the word of Allah does not have the same luxury. Hence, there is no way to approach the problem from a purely religious point of view. In fact, any re-interpretation of the Koran will only exacerbate the problem as the resulting schism will serve to further radicalize those who refuse to accept the change.

This is why our current policy of trying to reform the political societies where terrorism is nurtured has a chance of succeeding. By modernizing politics in those benighted countries, there’s a chance that eventually people will stop looking for justification to kill from their Holy Book and instead look for reasons to live. The medieval Christan church found plenty of justification in the Bible for burning witches, killing Jews, and torturing heretics. It wasn’t until the rise of nation states in Europe with the subsequent loss of power by the Church that people stopped looking for justifications to punish and instead looked to the Bible for a way to live in a modern world that these practices mostly died out.

We can only hope for something similar to happen with Islam. When I hear people say that what Islam needs is a Martin Luther King, Jr. I have to disagree. They don’t need a King: They need a Martin Luther to nail 95 reasons to live to the door of a mosque.

UPDATE

Try Basil’s Brunch. The layout looks sumptuous.

Just when you think the rhetoric of those seeking to pollute the 9/11 Memorial with anti-American propaganda can’t sink any lower, up steps the New York Times to call those of us who come down on the side of a site that’s totally devoted to the events and heroes of that tragic day “un-American.”

It is a campaign about political purity - about how people remember 9/11 and about how we choose to read its aftermath, including the Iraq war. On their Web site, www.takebackthememorial.org, critics of the cultural plan at ground zero offer a resolution called Campaign America. It says that ground zero must contain no facilities “that house controversial debate, dialog, artistic impressions, or exhibits referring to extraneous historical events.” This, to us, sounds un-American.

The Times defends the size of the Memorial by saying it “is larger than the public spaces in the Whitney Museum.” A Memorial honoring the victims of the largest, the most destructive, and the deadliest terrorist attack in the history of the United States should not be compared in any way, shape or form to an art museum (I will forgo commentary about the anti-American nature of much of the politically motivated art at the Whitney). By drawing an analogy with the Whitney, the Times unconsciously reveals how it views the events of 9/11 and its aftermath.

It’s a theme I’ve dealt with many times here; there is a sizable segment of the left that cannot grasp or refuses to see that the world changed following 9/11. They see terrorism as a “nuisance” and as a problem for international law enforcement. The interconnectedness of al Qaeda with rogue states is not something to concern ourselves with. The war in Iraq is unnecessary because Saddam Hussein wasn’t an “immediate” threat.

This is a mindset that can compare the interrogation techniques used at Guantanamo with the behavior of the worst tyrants in history because at bottom, they do not believe we are at war. They concentrate on everything but the ongoing struggle because to do so would explode cherished myths both about the War on Terror and the United States in general.

The hearkening back to Viet Nam, the constant comparisons with Hitler, the belief in conspiracies, all seek to obscure the harsh reality that there are thousands and thousands of terrorists out there supported by millions of others who wish to wipe us off the face of this earth! For whatever reason, this hasn’t penetrated the minds of the editorial page writers at the New York Times. They see this battle over the Memorial and truly can’t understand why anyone would object to the casual anti American bias that’s become so commonplace to the left that no one gives it a second thought anymore. They are playing by rules that became obsolete the second that first plane plowed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. And sadly, this editorial reveals their lack of understanding of how truly hallowed a place the Memorial is to not just the families of the fallen, but to those who understand the nature of the life and death struggle we’re in and see any besmirching of America through the selective use of history to be sacrilege.

Karen Lee who lost her husband on that horrible day sums it up perfectly: “What happened that day was not about left and right. It was about right and wrong.”

Given the moral relativism of the Times and the rest of the lickspittle left, it’s hardly surprising that they just don’t get it.

To contribute or get involved in the fight to Take Back the Memorial, go here.

UPDATE

Michelle Malkin:

All I’ll add is that a newspaper dumb enough to publish editorials like this one in a post-9/11 world has some nerve lecturing anyone else about a “sense of proportion”–let alone about what’s “un-American.”

‘Nuff said.

I received a comment on the originial post from someone purporting to be Larry Johnson:

Hey boneheads,
I actually spoke with Admiral Inman. He said he was misquoted (Gee, what a surprise, the NRO can’t get its story straight). He’s disgusted by the attacks on Valerie Plame. You guys only got one thing right, Admiral Inman is a class act.

After quickly looking behind me to make sure that I was still the only person blogging on this site, I accessed a technorati search on “Larry Johnson” that referenced both my post below and a post on Josh Marshall’s TCMP Cafe from guest blogger Larry Johnson that does indeed talk about a phonecon between Johnson and Inman:

Admiral Inman was quoted out of context. I spoke with him this afternoon after alerting him to the National Review online quote. He takes very seriously the compromise of Valerie’s cover. He was telling Mr. Spruiell that anyone in the intel community would not be in a position to intuitively know whether Valerie was or was not undercover at first glance. However, since they are in the intel community they have clearances and should not be out and about talking about people they do not know.

Um…no, that’s not what Admiral Inman was saying. Inman was specifically taking the CIA leakers to task for their dirty work during the campaign last fall.

For the record, Valerie Plame was not working as a CIA analyst, she was undercover, per press reports, as an Energy Analyst for Brewster Jennings. Inman did not misstate her position, and told me he has no firsthand knowledge of her cover status. This speaks very poorly about the journalistic standards of the NRO.

Is it bad journalism to print exactly what Admiral Inman said? Inman said he didn’t know Mrs. Wilson’s status. NRO had no comment on that. Where are journalistic standards violated?

Hey Larry! Can’t you take it when someone agrees with you?

Here, however is the meat of Mr. Johnson’s response to NRO and frankly, scares the wholly living beejeebees out of me.

To show how pathetically ignorant the National Review is on this matter, there have been CIA officers who started off as an analyst, who like me were undercover. They later switched-over to an operations officer career track and are now serving overseas in undercover positions.

What is so despicable about all of this is that the conservative movement, which was born in part from the efforts of Whittaker Chambers to expose communist treachery, is now serving as apologists for political operatives who have destroyed an intelligence network and at least one case officer’s distinguished career. The new standard for the Republican National Committee–Karl Rove didn’t commit a crime. Boy, there’s a slogan to run on, “At Least I Wasn’t Indicted”

Speaking of “pathetically ignorant,” it would come as pretty much a shock to most conservatives to learn that “the conservative movement… was born in part from the efforts of Whittaker Chambers to expose communist treachery…” I guess philosophers like F.A. Hayek, Russell Kirk, Robert Nisbet, Richard Weaver, Clinton Rossiter, and Leo Strauss not to mention Norman Podhoretz, Ben Wattenberg, Jeanne Kirkpatrick and other Neo Conservatives (you know, the real “neocons,” not everybody that falls under the rubric of the left’s lazy habit of calling anyone who disagrees with them a “necon”) don’t carry as much influence as the nearly 60 year old case involving Whittaker Chambers.

What the heck was this guy doing working for the CIA? My 16 year old cousin knows more about the history of conservatism than Larry Johnson. And this was someone who served as Deputy Director in the U.S. State Department’s Office of Counter Terrorism as well as working in the Operations Directorate at the CIA.

That statement - so ignorant of history and blatantly partisan in its intent - along with Mr. Johnson’s pre-9/11 statement about terrorism not being a big problem, causes me to question the sanity of whoever is doing the hiring and promoting at our intelligence services.

Chambers you may recall, was a former Communist who outed Alger Hiss as a communist spy working for the state department. The Congressional hearings on the matter as well as Hiss’ trial became left wing shorthand for the dangers of modern conservatism. The liberals held the Hiss case against Richard Nixon till the day he died and to this day (as Ann Coulter has noted in her book Treason) the left insists that Hiss was an innocent victim of a smear campaign by Chambers and Nixon.

The only problem with that is that Hiss was guilty as sin.

Revelations contained in the Venona Files prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Hiss was not loyal to the United States government, was a member of the Communist Party USA, and that he gave Stalin a preview of our negotiating position at the Yalta Conference that ended up dividing Europe into “spheres of influence” between the west and the Soviet Union, thus condemning millions of people to living lives under a barbarous tyranny.

To replay the entire Chambers-Hiss-Nixon drama would take up more bandwidth than Mr. Johnson is worth . For the barebones facts of the case, Wikpedia has a good summary. Hiss was only convicted of perjury even though the US government was aware of his perfidy. Not wanting to take a chance on losing their ability to intercept Soviet cables, (the Venona files) an ability that would have been revealed if the government put on the table everything it had on him, Hiss got away with his treason. He was even re-admitted to the bar in 1975 after it was revealed that there was a considerable amount of government misconduct in his perjury trial. Of course, the misconduct did not obviate the perjury itself nor did it negate the fact that Hiss was a traitor to his country.

Hiss was considered a martyr until the Venona files became public. Even then, many liberals refused to believe the evidence of their own eyes and prefer to think Alger Hiss is innocent. After all, they’re part of the “Reality Based Community” which these days actually means “Never let reality stand in the way of obfuscating the truth.”

The fact that Mr. Johnson attempts to raise the specter of Chambers is revealing in that this “registered Republican” is more of a partisan hack and less the heroic defender of Maiden Wilson’s honor than he lets on.

UPDATE

NRO’s Stephen Spruiell responds to Larry Johnson’s inaccurate post at TCMP Cafe referenced above. The happless Mr. Johnson is gonna need some rectal surgery to repair the damage done by Mr. Spruiell’s scathing comeback:

So let’s review: I removed an inaccurate statement that reflected well on Rove and the administration, and Larry Johnson accuses me of taking Inman out of context in order to make his statements reflect well on Rove and the administration. It’s this kind of analytical prowess that led Larry Johnson to get the pre-9/11 terrorist threat so unbelievably wrong.

It sucks that I have to interrupt my wedding to rebut this clueless publicity hound, but I’m not going to let him get away with claiming a monopoly on the capital-T Truth. For someone who has publicly demonstrated such faulty perception regarding the greatest threat of our time, I’m surprised Johnson is so arrogant.

The only surprise is that Johnson can walk and chew gum at the same time. He’s not arrogant…he’s blissfully ignorant.