Considerettes

Right Wing News has the latest update on quotes from folks who just knew that Saddam Hussein had WMDs and that they were a real threat to America. The list is staggering.

I saw that! Marcland has linked to a couple of recent posts here, so the least I could do is fix his link on the blog roll. 🙂 He’s moved recently, so if you have a bookmark on him, jump on over and update it.

James Taranto’s “Best of the Web Today” today has a great synopsis of the war debate, specifically heads rolling at the BBC over their skewed coverage, misreporting of David Kay by the NY Times, and the antiwar-for-oil crowd (that is, those who were against the war because they were getting under-the-table sweetheart deals for Iraqi oil as long as Hussein was around).

Some of my favorite posts from this week’s Carnival of the Vanities:

• “Commentariat” notes why liberals don’t really understand the idea of Bush’s faith-based initiatives. Actually it has far less to do with them being “faith-based”, and more to do with the idea that if the private sector (faith-based or otherwise) can help the poor better and more efficiently, why should we replace them with a bloated, inefficient government program?
• A thoughtful treatment of religion v. politics by homicidalmaniak.
• The SmarterCop fisks the Democratic presidential candidates as they react to David Kay’s WMD report.
• Those candidates could learn a few things at Libertyblog, where those erroneous conclusions could be corrected.
• Joe Kelley, just for the sake of argument, suggests that, in line with Nashville schools doing away with the honor roll because of self-esteem issues, we should forget about voting or playing the Super Bowl or counting a blog’s incoming links or successfully reaching Mars or paying anyone more money than somebody else. After all, in all those cases, somebody succeeds and somebody doesn’t.
• Walloworld has some very good insights into whether or not the Internet is becoming an echo chamber.

So do they or don’t they exist?

SOFIA, Bulgaria (Reuters) – Iraqi foreign minister Hoshiyar Zebari said Thursday Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction had been carefully hidden, but he was confident they could be discovered.

“I have every belief that some of these weapons could be found as we move forward,” Zebari, an Iraqi Kurd, told a news conference in Sofia. “They have been hidden in certain areas. The system of hiding was very sophisticated.”
…
Former chief U.S. weapons hunter David Kay said Wednesday “we were almost all wrong” about the issue and it was “highly unlikely that there were large stockpiles of deployed militarized chemical and biological weapons” in Iraq.

But Zebari, on a visit to Bulgaria, said: “We as Iraqis have seen Saddam Hussein develop, manufacture and use these weapons of mass destruction against us. He hasn’t denied that.”

Zebari was apparently referring to the use of chemical weapons by Saddam’s forces against Iraqi Kurdish villages in the late 1980s.

This reiterates what I said to the E-mailer suggesting the certainty of WMDs in Iraq was “none“. Zebari may be right, and we just haven’t looked in the right places (it is a huge country). Kay may be right, and Saddam may have just been hoodwinked by his weapons guys. But there’s no doubt that WMDs had been used in the past. That alone pushed the certainty gauge much closer to Zebari.

“Considerable Quotes” has been blogrolled by Amy Ridenour’s National Center Blog, so back atcha.

My lengthy post regarding my E-mail exchange with a reader on global warming is part of this week’s Carnival of the Vanities, and there’s a boatload of other blogs to take a peek at while you’re there.

Even given the problems in our intelligence gathering, as noted by David Kay, that caused the Clinton administration to overestimate the WMD issue in Iraq, it’s nice to know that there are still a lot of folks who believe we still did the right thing in Iraq.

[Thabet Karim] Jassem was among thousands of Iraqis that had been stranded on the Kuwait-Iraq border last week over visa problems. Some 33,000 Iraqis were chosen by lottery to perform the Haj this year, the first pilgrimage for post-Saddam Iraq.

“We remained nine days at the border, it was a very miserable time for thousands,” said Bakkar Rasoul, a Kurdish eye doctor from Suleimaniya. “But I am really happy that we are free and God helped us to visit Makkah.”

“I and many people are thankful towards the United States because they were able to release us and we will definitely never forget. I don’t think any Muslim can forget this,” he said, standing by Kurdish and Iraqi flags beside the Iraqi pilgrims.

You’re welcome sir. Some folks don’t understand it, but I’m glad you do.

Justice Antonin Scalia was right:

Justice Antonin Scalia warned that the ruling [that struck down Texas’ anti-sodomy law] would unleash a wave of challenges to state laws against “bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity.”

So what’s one of the results of that ruling?

Sure enough, [Brian] Barnard, a civil rights attorney, has brought a lawsuit challenging Utah’s ban on polygamy. And some legal experts say the case could have a fighting chance because of the Supreme Court’s gay-sex ruling.

The federal lawsuit, filed Jan. 12, involves a married couple, identified only as G. Lee Cook and D. Cook, and a woman, J. Bronson, who wanted to enter into a plural marriage but were denied a marriage license by Salt Lake County clerks.

Can you hear it; the sound of American society sliding further down that slippery slope? It’s almost deafening.

What liberal media?

ABC News correspondent John Stossel, the co-anchor of 20/20, said most mainstream journalists, including those at his network, are leftists who view conservatives as “selfish and cruel” for embracing capitalism.
…
Before adopting a skeptical view of the government and public-interest groups, Stossel was an enterprising consumer reporter. He won 18 Emmys while exposing shady business practices. But since realizing that more regulation might not be the answer to the world’s problems, Stossel said he has observed changes, and he has only won one Emmy in that time.

“Leftist thinking is just the culture that I live in and the culture the reporters who populate the mainstream media live in,” he said. “Everybody just agrees – more safety regulation, gun control, higher taxes. Who could not want that? Everybody around here wants that. Anyone who disagrees is seen as not just wrong but selfish and cruel. If I try to discuss this with my peers, I get blank stares.”

He added, “The press is so filled with hatred for capitalism that someone who advocates for free markets rather than government control is a conservative and a problem.”

Some might say that Stossel’s very existence on 20/20 proves that ABC is balanced. Not necessarily.

“ABC, God bless them, they don’t always agree with me,” he said, “but they let me do most of the things I want to do.”

Stossel passed up the opportunity to talk about the work of other ABC News journalists, including World News Tonight anchor Peter Jennings. The Media Research Center, the parent organization of CNSNews.com, has criticized Jennings for biased reporting on the Bush administration and the Iraq war among other issues.

“I think as long as ABC is paying me,” Stossel said, “they have a right to have me shut up about my opinions about what other people at ABC are doing.”

One John Stossel does not balance all the other bias out. In fact, being able to count the number of conservatives or libertarians at ABC News on one hand actually proves that point.

How does this bias become media-wide?

“The reason the [New York] Times, and to a lesser extent the [Washington] Post, are so important, and they are, is because the TV and radio – all of the media – copy it sycophantically,” he said. “That’s how bias at the Times becomes bias in other media.”

A herd mentality, but for independent thinkers like Stossel. Media objectivity? Give me a break!