Dum Pendebat Filius

Thirst

I used to marvel at Charles Krauthammer’s insatiable thirst for Kool-Aid. Then I had a look at David’s Blog this evening, and I’m inclined to say there’s an even thirstier wingnut out there, and it would be my favorite intellectual scuttlefish, David Horowitz. Look at this craziness.

I’m telling you, if there’s a drop of wingnut Kool-Aid left in the country this evening, it’s not Horowitz’s fault. That man elbowed Krauthammer aside and took it all for himself, guzzling every blast-fax talking point he could get his hands on, desperately trying to slake his rapacious thirst. Look at the very first paragraph:

So now we know a lot of the facts. In the midst of a war, a rogue CIA employee named Valerie Plame set out to sabotage the President’s war policy — a policy ratified by both political parties and both houses of Congress. To do this she sent her husband on a mission to Niger to discredit the President’s statement that Saddam Hussein was seeking uranium there — in other words to discredit a justification for the war in which Americans were continuing to die. Forget for a moment the treasonous nature of an action designed to undermine a duly arrived at war policy and to destroy the credibility of the commander-in-chief while this nation’s soldiers were in harm’s way. The mere act of sending a relative on a mission like this was illegal under existing statutes for someone in Plame’s position.

It’s a “fact” that Valerie Plame was a “rogue CIA agent” bent on “discrediting” President Bush. It’s a “fact,” readers. David Horowitz says so. That he omitted to echo the Fox News “Karl Rove deserves a medal” line must have been an oversight, such was his zeal to get it all written quickly.

The imputations and outright accusations of treason keep on coming, and his prose begins to deteriorate badly:

The Plame-Wilson lie was designed to make the President look like a liar and the nation’s democratically and legally arrived at war policy a fraud… No psychological warfare campaign ever conducted by an enemy against the United States has been as effetive as this one…

It emboldened our terrorist enemies, and sowed distrust in Europe and throughout the world about American policies, continued for more than six months with of course the megaphone provided by the NY Times and other Bush-hating and America bashing media institutions.

Forget Karl Rove. Just concentrate on Valerie-n-Joe, and what terrible people they are. They wanted to destroy our nation! And that dirty Bush-bashing media just piled it on, comme d’habitude. That’s what’s important.

Sub-Joycean Monologue Intérieur

The more he types, the angrier he gets, and the worse his English gets. See if you can make sense out of this rant:

[David] Corn was the first to suggest that outing Plame as a rogue CIA employee was itself treason and certainly against the law. It was not. Plame is not a cover CIA operative and besides and all its Democrat friends in Congress opposed the law protecting CIA agents and protected and even lionized the rogue CIA agent Philip Agee whose leaks of the names of covert CIA agents had gotten one agent killed and was responsible for the enactment of the law.

Savor that prose. Dispense with capitalization and punctuation and we could be reading the last chapter of the wingnut version of Ulysses.

Tarbrush

Dems aren’t as bad as lefty moonbats like anyone associated with The Nation, but…

Unlike the Nation radicals, they are not rooting for our enemies to win. On the other hand, over and over in this war they have shown that they are prepared to win elections even at the cost of American defeats in the war on terror — which as we can easily caculate may cost 100,000 American lives at a blow. Or as the President once put it to Tom Daschle, they are a party who will put their partisan interests above the security of 300 million Americans.

It’s simple:
GOP == National Security
Dhimmicraps == Partisan saboteurs ‘n’ fellow travelers

More Kool-Aid, and a Confused Coda

Next, in a last-second shifting of gears, thirsty Horowitz refills his glass, slakes his thirst, cracks his knuckles, and gets down to denyin’ some torture:

In a synchronity that all honest liberals should pay attention to, an appeals court has found that no torture or illegality took place at Guantanamo and that the legal campaign led by communist supporter Michael Ratner in behalf of the Guantanamo terrorists is based on an even bigger lie than the Plame-Wilson sabotage. In this assault on the war on terror from behind our lines the Democratic Party is also a willing and essential accomplice.

The “appeals court” he’s talking about seems to be the one that decided Salim Ahmed Hamdan was not subject to the Geneva Conventions and “could be tried by a military tribunal, reversing a lower court decision that such a trial was unlawful and would violate his rights.” It seems he’s gotten that confused with the military’s conclusions about its self-investigation:

Guantanamo Bay interrogators degraded and abused a key prisoner but did not torture him when they told him he was gay, forced him to dance with another man and made him wear a bra and perform dog tricks, military investigators said on Wednesday…

U.S. interrogators also told him he was a homosexual, forced him to dance with a male interrogator, told him his mother and sister were whores, forced him to wear a leash and perform dog tricks, menaced him with a dog and regularly subjected him to interrogations up to 20 hours a day for about two months, the report said.

Air Force Lt. Gen. Randall Schmidt, who headed the probe into FBI accounts of abuse of Guantanamo prisoners by Defense Department personnel, concluded that the man was subjected to “abusive and degrading treatment” due to “the cumulative effect of creative, persistent and lengthy interrogations.” The techniques used were authorized by the Pentagon, he said.

“As the bottom line, though, we found no torture. Detention and interrogation operations were safe, secure and humane,” Schmidt said.

The Pentagon identified the man as Mohamed al-Qahtani and said he ultimately provided “extremely valuable intelligence.”

(”Degraded and abused,” but not “tortured.” OK.)

No “appeals court” found any of the things Horowitz claims they did. Is he lying, or just deeply confused? What do you reckon?

David’s Glug

It’s time for the Democrats to stop their sabotage of the war on terror. It’s time for them to put away the witch-hunt against Karl Rove and Homeland Security, and to begin finally to think about defending this country instead of its internal enemies.

He has glugged it all down, friends. Every last drop.