Wow. Just ... wow. I don't know if it's the Democratic takeover, or the complete unraveling of their pet war, or just the final stages of a congnitive dissonance so bad as to induce utter insanity, but ... the right wing blogs are just completely off-the-rails, cheese-has-slipped-off-their-crackers, out-there-where-the-buses-don't-run ... crazy. Nuts. And any other word/phrase you got for crazy.
There was a diary the other day showing the hilarious graphic RedState put up about the "Democrat-Socialist Majority," a ridiculous mishmash of outdated, Vietnam-era smears which made me think oddly of Biff's "make like a tree and get out of here" from the old Back to the Future. But the real point of departure from reality, the real crashing of their Barbara Bushian Beautiful Minds, comes in the reaction to Jamil Hussein.
For those who haven't been following it, the right-wing side of the blogs have been going on and on (and on) about Jamil Hussein, an Iraqi police officer used as a source in AP's reporting, particularly their story about the people being burned alive. The Iraqi Interior Ministry claimed he didn't exist, the US Army said they had no record of the guy, and the wingnuts just swallowed that line whole and went on and on (and on) attacking the AP about it. It was a bizarre thing from the beginning, as if this one story changed a whit the reality that Iraq is a complete fiasco and a tragedy. But now, of course, it turns out that Jamil Hussein exists after all, is just what the AP claims he is, and is facing arrest for talking to reporters (ummmm, democracy on the march?).
Of course, anyone who's read the right-wing blogs for any time would know that they never, ever admit error, so I was interested to see the overall reaction to it. Unfortunately, that would involve cruising around those blogs and actually reading a large collection of them, an exercise that ... well, who would want to?
Gladly, in a post of unspeakable comedic value and equal horror, Michelle Malkin has put together a pretty comprehensive run-down of the reaction to Jamil Hussein's existence. Let's take a look at a few ...
Dan Riehl:
Fascinating. But let me be the first to say to the Left, before they lose themselves in glee, I don't see that bloggers have anything to apologize for, nor do I see this story being at an end. The ultimate question is what happened in Hurriya the day six Sunnis were claimed to have been burned alive?
Did it happen? Is Shi'ite domination of one or more ministries trying to cover up violence by Shi'ite factions? Or is Hussein unreliable as a source?
If the story ends up being an expose' on a troubling Shi'ite dominated Iraqi regime, as opposed to the AP being light on sourcing, so be it. Like most bloggers following this story, all I have ever wanted is the truth.
"All I have ever wanted is the truth." Bwahahahahaha! This is a perfect example of the rightwing blogs endless game of Calvinball. But, that one was positively lucid compared to some of the others ...
Bill Faith:
Color this old dog very, very skeptical. So, the Iraqi Police may or may not arrest some dude and claim he's Jamil, then they may or may not put him in a line-up where the AP people can claim "Yes we see him but we aren't going to identify him; must protect our sources, y'know," and we're all supposed to just forget about all those sole-sourced stories that still don't check out? And our source for all this new-found knowledge is ... the AP?
Taking reality-denial to new heights.
So, the Iraqi Interior Ministry says he's real, the AP reports that, but since we can't trust the AP anymore because they used a fake Jamil Hussein, how can we know they're telling the truth when they report Jamil Hussein is real? Huh?1? Huh?!?
Well, Bill, you got me there. But, then, how do we know you are real? Or ... god, what if we're all in some kind of computer-generated matrix, and we're really just energy devices for some massive computer/machine society? Who's Jamil Hussein then?
And, taking things to an extreme even I never expected, here's Michelle promoting a comment from Paterico:
So why has it taken all this time to produce him then?
And where are the bodies of the folks that were burned alive? And what about the mosques that weren’t destroyed?
I’m making the same point as Patterico of course - the underlying story was the original problem. The failure to produce this guy was just the marker that let you KNOW it was BS.
So they produced him. Now produce the people set on fire and destroyed buildings claimed in the story. Otherwise its nonsense.
What can you say to that? That's absolutely hilarious in the most horrifying sort of way. Produce the people set on fire!!! Not only is it logistically, um, difficult to do what that guy suggests, but the very thought of "producing" victims of such a horrible event and parading them in front of right-wing bloggers just to counter their bizarre fantasy about Iraq's violence being a media creation sickens me.
That's how I usually end up when I read rightwing blogs talking about Iraq for any length of time. I start out finding some humor in their insanity, but then, pretty quickly, I move to horror at the yawning emptiness in the souls of anyone who can play such semantic games with an event that is destroying a country and killing more people than the US has lost in any war ever. An entire society is being ripped apart, and they are playing Calvinball about the existence of single police captain and asking for weeks-old, burnt corpses to be produced and exhibited.
And the denial of reality ... it's an oft-remarked feature of the right-wing blogs, but it's still extremely odd and disturbing. Orwell, of course, warned about Newspeak, but, in his European way, he only imagined a totalitarian government forcing Newspeak downward on its citizens. But here in the good ol' USA, we've managed to create the phenomenon of grass-roots Newspeak, an entire volunteer movement (with some quasi-pros like Malkin) dedicated to creating misleading rhetoric and changing the facts when they don't suit the ideology.
Thank god for the Democratic takeover in Congress. Without that, I don't think I could've taken it all much longer ...