The rightwing media long ago abandoned any kind of pretense to reason or truth, and thereby proved in a few short years that the flinching tittybabies of 9/11 Nation will gobble up whatever gift-wrapped turd is dangled before their maws, as long as it makes them feel entitled to remain epically wrong. Now, finally, an experiment that appears designed to test the hypothesis that maybe you don't even need to spend the money to gift-wrap that turd!
The latest news from Iran about the supposed abandonment in 2003 of the effort to produce a Bomb — if even remotely accurate — presents somewhat of a dilemma for liberal Democrats.
Are they now to suggest that Republicans have been warmongering over a nonexistent threat for partisan purposes? But to advance that belief is also to concede that Iran, like Libya, likely came to a conjecture (around say early spring 2003?) that it was not wise for regimes to conceal WMD programs, given the unpredictable, but lethal American military reaction.
I mean, wow. You just have to marvel at these people. Victor Davis Hanson, I fucking salute you, and I fucking surrender. For it is no longer possible to engage you in debate. You have slipped the surly bonds of reality, and rocketed headlong into a Ren and Stimpy episode.
And me without my rubber nipples.
As I futiley attempt to keep strands of my gelatinized mind from oozing through my fingers, I see that you have posited above that the revelation that Iran's nuclear program has been sidetracked since 2003 is really a problem for Democrats, and not Republicans or Bush. And you know, I'm okay with that so far. My mind can process the reality that Democrats have a certain mystical "abraca-pocus" when it comes to making Bush's problems their problems.
But to posit that we should credit Bush's Iraq war for the fact that Iran has no nuclear weapons is simply an historically unprecedented stroke of cartoonish brilliance. It is so cartoonishly brilliant, in fact, that all I can equate it to is the moment when The Grinch tells Cindy Loo Who that he's taking her Christmas tree away so he can fix a light that isn't working right.
I am confident that there are no one-word descriptors in the English language for what you have achieved here. "Mendacious" and "audacious" are both directionally correct, but fall so far short of capturing the true essence as to be non-starters. No, we need a new word entirely for this.
"Omnishitous?"
"Pancraptic?"
"Transcatalogical?"
Nope. Still not good enough.
After all, what critic would wish now to grant that one result of the 2003 war — aside from the real chance that Iraq can stabilize and function under the only consensual government in the region — might have been the elimination, for some time, of two growing and potentially nuclear threats to American security, quite apart from Saddam Hussein?
Who, indeed, Victor Davis Hanson. Who, indeed.
This is where we are, folks. This is what the Republican media is reduced to serving up. And in a way, I honestly think it's brilliant. It is brilliant, because you can't find as much as a toehold. You can't argue with Hanson anymore than you can argue with a streetwalking schizophrenic who insists the Neptunians are speaking to him from special antennae in his shoelaces.
It's over, folks. They won. I throw in the towel. The rhetorical Pac Man machine of politics has been bested, and all that's left to do now is stare at the pretty pixels.