Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [31]
Naturally, the most hysterical response came from MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann. After donning his mother’s housecoat, undergarments, and fuzzy slippers, Keith brandished the NIE report, night after night, demanding that Bush apologize to the Iranians.
“Having accused Iran of doing something it had stopped doing more than four years ago,” Olbermann thundered, “instead of apologizing or giving a diplomatic response of any kind, this president of the United States chuckled.”
Olbermann ferociously defended Mahmoud (a fan of the show) from aspersions cast by the Bush administration, asking if the president could make “any more of a mess” than by chuckling “in response to Iran’s anger at being in some respects, at least, either overrated or smeared.”17 Bush had “smeared” Ahmadinejad!
Most sanctimoniously, Keith said, “Given the astonishment with which President Clinton’s lie about his personal life was met in the media, in the newspapers, where is that level of interest in this president’s lie? That first one was a lie about an intern and maybe some testimony. This is a lie about the threat of nuclear war.”18
Bush didn’t believe the intelligence. Clinton said he wasn’t sure if Monica Lewinsky performed oral sex on him.
Keith’s Ed McMahon, the ever-obliging Howard Fineman of Newsweek, said that the leaked intelligence showed that Bush “has zero credibility.”19 The next night, Keith’s even creepier sidekick, androgynous Newsweek reporter Richard Wolffe, also agreed, saying American credibility “has suffered another serious blow.”20
Olbermann’s most macho guest, Rachel Maddow, demanded to know—with delightful originality—“what the president knew and when he knew it.”21 Again, this was on account of Bush’s having disparaged the good name of a sawed-off, Jew-hating nut-burger, despite the existence of a cheery report on Iran produced by our useless intelligence agencies.
Poor Ahmadinejad!
Keith, who knows everything that’s on the Daily Kos and nothing else, called those who doubted the NIE report “liars” and repeatedly demanded an investigation into when Bush knew about it. He was even happier than Ahmadinejad, who proclaimed the NIE report “a declaration of the Iranian people’s victory against the great powers.”22
A lot of Republicans were suspicious of the intelligence, from John Bolton to Dick Cheney. The report’s release was precisely timed to embarrass Bush inasmuch as it followed a series of bellicose remarks from the administration about Iran. Moreover, anyone who knows about these things knows that the United States has the worst intelligence-gathering operations in the world. The Czechs, the French, the Italians—even the Iraqis (who were trained by the Soviets)—have better intelligence. Burkina Faso has better intelligence—and their director of intelligence is a witch doctor. The marketing division of Wal-Mart has more reliable intel than the U.S. government does.
After Watergate, the off-the-charts left-wing Congress gleefully set about dismantling this nation’s intelligence operations on the theory that Watergate never would have happened if only there had been no CIA. This is a little like dismantling your car because you accidentally hit the mailbox. (Democrats are apparently opposed to intelligence of any sort.)
Ron Dellums, a typical Democrat of the time, who—amazingly—was a member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, famously declared in 1975, “We should totally dismantle every intelligence agency in this country piece by piece, brick by brick, nail by nail.”
And so they did.
So now our spies are prohibited from spying. The only job of a CIA officer these days is to read foreign newspapers and leak classified information to the New York Times. It’s like a secret society of newspaper readers. The reason no one at the CIA saw 9/11 coming was that there wasn’t anything about it in the Islamabad Post. (On the plus side, at least