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Washington Monthly: Paul Glastris: ‘Kerry’s willingness to protest the war is an essential part of what, to my mind, makes him one of the great heroes.’

New Yorker: Seymour Hersh: ‘Such dehumanization is unacceptable in any culture, but it is especially so in the Arab world.’

A fascinating tidbit from Juan Cole, Professor of History at the University of Michigan, as he discusses the Reagan years and specifically, the relationship between Reagan’s actions and 9/11 —

The Christian Coalition and other rightwing religious groups supporting Reagan even had a “biblical checklist” by which they wanted all senators and congressmen to be judged. And one of the items in the “biblical checklist” was “support for the Afghan ‘freedom fighters’” [that is, the “Gulbuddin Hikmatyars and Usama Bin Ladens”]. The rightwing Christians were saying in the 1980s that if you didn’t support al-Qaeda and its Mujahidin allies, you didn’t deserve to be in Congress!

1st thought: And have we grown in wisdom and discernment since then?
2nd thought: Apparently not.
3rd thought: Dogmatic certainty ain’t what it’s cracked up to be.

Josh Marshall at TPM recommends Juan’s site as “one of the few places online — in English at least — where you can find good sustained reporting on these nitty-gritty details of what’s going on over in Iraq. Invaluable.”

And of course Josh creates invaluable reporting of his own. At The Hill Josh writes:

In recent months, Democrats have criticized President Bush for claiming that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) posed an imminent threat to the United States. Ted Kennedy said it. Wes Clark said it. And plenty of others have, too.

But now Republicans say it’s a bum rap. A chorus of conservative columnists and talk-show hosts claims that nobody in the administration ever said any such thing.

“No member of the administration,” conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan recently wrote, “used the term ‘imminent threat’ to describe Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. No one.”

Really, how dumb is it to say something like this when Google’s memory is wide, deep, and instantly accessible? And indeed Josh proceeds to mine this digital deposit to deftly demolish this wacky, “no one ever said that” assertion.

Weirdly though, such assertions often work, in part I think because people like me respond with our mouths open in disbelief that any self-respecting person could utter easily-disprovable nonsense like this.

Which I guess makes me like a bullsht detector with an almost-dead battery — I detect the bullsht, but don’t have enough juice to sound the piercing beep.

Note to myself: Re-read Atrios’ principles of wingnut argument until Dumbstruck Response is eliminated and action ensues. We’ve got a country to reclaim, and a sh*tload of intellectual laziness and dishonor to work off.

2003-11-06 update: I see that Ben at SpinSanity attempts further precision concerning who said what about “imminent threat,” but he’s not as convincing as he usually is.

As a practical matter, splitting hairs whether and how often Mr. Bush said the word “imminent” followed by the word “threat” concerning Iraq is about as meaningful as debating whether and how often he explicitly connected the events of 9/11 with Saddam Hussein. Both false assertions were implied with sledgehammer subtlety and numbing frequency — and thus led to present consequences too real and too pressing for us to waste time engaging in technical difficulties, for which see —

Steven at Ethel the Blog, following Atrios’ lead, seeks to assemble the definitive Wingnut Debate Dictionary. Pretty darned funny. I see in these definitions that almost all of us stumble into bits of wingnuttery occasionally, but some of us seem to be stuck there.