They Are ALL Crazy

This is not a parody. When I say wingnut, I mean really, really out of their minds or deliberately lying with reckless disregard.



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Sometimes, we think, it must be nice to be John Bolton, the controversial former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. After all, if we were Bolton, then we too would get to go on CNN and lie without so much as a peep in response from anchor Wolf Blitzer.

That's what Bolton did in an appearance Monday. The bombastic, hawkish former ambassador was busy asserting that negotiations with Iran about that country's nuclear program wouldn't accomplish anything when Blitzer asked him, "But why not? Why not? Libya agreed to give up its nuclear ambitions. North Korea supposedly is doing that as a result of pressure and negotiations. Why not the Iranians?"

Bolton was ready with an answer. "Let's take it one at a time. Libya agreed to give up its nuclear weapons program because Muammar Gadhafi believed, mistakenly, that our having overthrown Saddam Hussein meant he was probably next."

Compelling! But, sadly, not true, as Blitzer's audience would have found out if Blitzer had challenged Bolton's assertion. In fact, it's been well-established for a couple years now that Libya's move wasn't tied in any way to the invasion of Iraq, and that talks about disarmament had started as far back as 1992 and became serious shortly after 9/11.

How do we know this? Well, author Ron Suskind has a pretty good rundown of the facts in his book "The One Percent Doctrine." He summarizes the series of negotiations that began after 9/11 (details of which can be read in the book excerpt available here) by saying, "[M]uch to the chagrin of White House hawks, the disarming of Gadhafi wasn't due to the Bush administration following its 'new rules' for angrily confronting rogue states. It was due to the Bush administration setting them, for once, aside."

And if that isn't enough evidence for you, well, then, there's always the words of both Libya's foreign minister and Gadhafi's son Saif Al-Islam. Each of them have separately denied that Iraq had anything to do with Libya's decision to disarm. Actually, in 2004, it was none other than CNN that reported the younger Gadhafi's denial. "The son of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi told CNN Saturday that 'the capture of Saddam or the invasion of Iraq is irrelevant' to Libya's announcement that it is to abandon its weapons of mass destruction program," an article on the network's Web site reads. The article further quotes him as saying, "In fact, we started the cooperation even before the invasion of Iraq."

Back to you, Wolf.

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What kind of a critical mind does it take to be a Dittohead, a follower of Rush Limbaugh? The man himself, "America's Truth Detector", led by example last week, when he broadcast news of a scientific paper titled, "Carbon dioxide production by benthic bacteria: the death of manmade global warming theory?" The paper was a hoax. (The Web site for the invented "Journal of Geoclimatic Studies" that "published" the study has been taken down; the paper is cached here, and the New York Times's environment blog has a good run-down of the whole affair.) To a climate-change denier, though -- especially one conditioned to believe that the scientific establishment is out to get them -- the paper had a ring of truth. In the article's abstract, the embattled "authors" complain that a "powerful and hostile" scientific establishment turned a deaf ear to their hard evidence: "When we have challenged prominent climate scientists who subscribe to the climate change 'consensus'," the "authors" wrote, "our concerns are met with evasion and in some cases aggression. Discussion of this issue has been all but prohibited by the editors of peer-reviewed scientific journals. This journal is a courageous exception, but it too has come under great pressure not to raise the issue."

Cue the bloggers.

"I applaud the courage of these researchers to put forth their study which will almost certainly be viciously attacked by the global warming cultists," said a blog that styles itself "Florida's premier conservative Weblog". On his blog at Reason Magazine's Web site, libertarian Ronald Bailey sounded a slightly milder tone: "This is a rather sweeping conclusion from research published in a minor journal and will likely produce howls of outrage from defenders of the consensus. Only further research and time will tell if these guys are on to something significant or if they have somehow misinterpreted what they believe they have discovered." Not exactly. Had any of these commentators read beyond the article's title, they would have quickly happened upon something in the introduction that might have at least prompted some skepticism: "Significant fluctuations in benthic eubacterial populations... cause far greater impacts on atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations than all other ecosystem effects." In other words, bacteria at the bottom of the ocean are have more effect on the atmospheric carbon dioxide ultimately blamed for warming than everything else in the world. When the hoax was revealed, some of the victims launched counter-attacks, decrying left-wing "Black PR ops," and warning of more to come. Many of them gave good-natured mea culpas. One act of contrition stood out. Roy Spencer, a prominent climate-change denier, took the blame for the head Dittohead's embarrassment: "I sent an e-mail to Rush about the issue regarding the hoax, with a copy of the 'research study,'" Spencer wrote. "Unfortunately, my very brief note to Rush was not very clear, and he thought that I was calling global warming a hoax, rather than the study."

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