Hangover Discurso

There's just too much insanity to keep up with in one Happy Hour these days.

One more thing that went wrong during the Bush regime (h/t):

The number of U.S. hate groups has increased by 48 percent, to 888, since 2000, according to experts at the Southern Poverty Law Center, an independent organization that monitors racist movements.

Why am I not surprised? Depressingly not surprised. Bush, across the board, brought out the worst in this country.

Meanwhile, Joe "Morning Bullshit" Scarborough just can't believe torture's not effective:

Joe Scarborough weighs in this morning with an opinion on the effectiveness of torture on Kalid Shaikh Mohammed:

SCARBOROUGH: I know for a fact that waterboarding brought our interrogators, brought Americans, probably about 70-75 percent of what they get. What they got from Khalid Shaikh Mohammed opened doors that we are still going through. Waterboarding has produced and given so much evidence to our people in the CIA and in the other intelligence agencies. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed by himself has done more to crush al Qaeda than Dick Cheney or George Bush because of waterboarding.

For a fact? Really?

From Jane Mayer's book, The Dark Side:

While Tenet continued to assure the White House that Mohammed's interrogation in particular had been a gold mine of invaluable intelligence, a few officers began to question the reliability of his coerced confessions. Some also feared that the torturous methods used by the Agency would undermine eventual efforts to convict him in any legitimate court. Mohammed claimed responsibility for so many crimes that his testimony began to seem inherently dubious. In addition to confessing to the [Daniel] Pearl murder, he said that he had hatched plans to assassinate President Clinton, President Carter, and Pope John Paul II. CIA cables carrying Mohammed's interrogation transcirpts back to Washington with the warning that "the detainee has been known to withhold information or deliberately mislead."

After Mohammed had been interrogated for some time, a top Agency official asked for a few choice revelations from his confession that he could share with officers from an allied foreign intelligence agency. To his surprise, he was told by top CIA officials that there really was noting "solid" enough to pass on. Although few outside of the CIA knew it, Mohammed had recanted substantial portions of his initial confessions.

[snip]

And David Rose wrote in Vanity Fair:

K.S.M. was certainly knowledgeable. It would be surprising if he gave up nothing of value. But according to a former senior C.I.A. official, who read all the interrogation reports on K.S.M., “90 percent of it was total fucking bullshit.” A former Pentagon analyst adds: “K.S.M. produced no actionable intelligence. He was trying to tell us how stupid we were.”

And Joe, I'm sure he's proud of you for proving his point so thoroughly.

While we're on the subject of astounding assclowns, want to know how the rabid right feels about Joe the Plumber turning war correspondent? I warn you, if you had any infinitesimal shred of respect for these people, it will be gone:

...I couldn't help but be curious about how far-right blogs feel about Wurzelbacher pretending to be a war correspondent.

To be fair, a lot of the major conservative blogs have steered clear of this mess. There are, however, some notable exceptions. Here, for example, is Power Line:

By my estimation, [Wurzelbacher] has gotten a better handle on the situation than his supposed betters in the media. [...]

Is there any chance Pajamas can send Joe on to Beirut, Damascus and Tehran after he completes his assignment in Israel? I think he could teach the media reporting from those locales how to do it right as well.

I'm so sure he could:

I realize I'm feeding the troll, but it's not often you see stupid on quite this magnificent a scale. "Joe" "The Plumber", while accusing a small gaggle of media of anti-Israel bias, ran into an actual journalist -- and promptly own-goaled himself (requires registration):

JOE: The story here is people are being killed and the media’s slanting it and trying to make it Hamas is, uh, as far as, that Israel’s being bad. Do you believe Israel is bad?

REPORTER: Do I believe it?

JOE: Yeah, do you?!

REPORTER: I’m Israeli, so…

JOE: So answer the question!

REPORTER: No, I don’t think Israel is bad.

JOE: Do you think Israel has every right to protect itself?

REPORTER: Yeah.

[pause]

JOE: You do?!

That's Pulitzer material, that is.