Thursday, July 31, 2003

Everybody knows at this point that Ann Coulter is either tendentious or out-and-out nuts, but now it appears she's just getting lazy:

But as Baghdad erupted in celebrations after receiving the news that Heckle and Jeckle were dead, liberals were still hopping mad that last January, President Bush uttered the indisputably true fact that British intelligence believed Saddam Hussein had tried to acquire uranium from Africa.

That was, and still is, believed by British intelligence. It also was, and still is, believed by our own National Intelligence Estimate service. The CIA, however, discounts this piece of intelligence.

The CIA did such a bang-up job predicting 9/11, the Democrats have decided to put all their faith in it. They believe the nation must not act until absolutely every agency and every last American is convinced we are about to be nuked. (Would that they had such strict standards for worrying about nuclear power plants at home.)
Discounting the "believed/learned" question, where exactly does Ann think the NIE comes from? Does she believe in intel gnomes?

And for that matter, why should these mystical NIE sources be trusted any more than the CIA when, um, they didn't predict 9/11 either? And what is the standard for acting? Should the United States start wars based on something somebody overheard in the Congressional cafeteria?

Leah over at Eschaton believes that this sort of thing is an excellent emetic. Personally, I think it should serve as a kind of bottom-rung IQ test. If this sort of twaddle can actually convince someone, it's pretty clear proof that they've got learning and logic issues; beliefs don't even enter into it.

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