Donald Rumsfeld Said Bin Laden's Mountain Lair was Serious Business

The fictoid of Bin Laden's mountain fortress

Paul Waldman has a great piece that will defibrillate your memory of the kind of BS that was coming out of the Bush-Cheney administration after they got caught with their pants down--after W himself had told the CIA agent that gave him the PDB on August 6, 2001 entitled Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US, "All right. You've covered your ass, now."

Here's a paragraph and the footnote from Paul:

The answer, in case you've forgotten, is that [Cheney] and so many other Bush administration officials were basically enacting a fantasy in which the enemy—"the terrorists"—were not actually a bunch of semi-literate religious fanatics who got incredibly lucky one time with an extraordinarily low-tech attack, but were actually evil geniuses, had unlimited resources at their disposal, and could execute complex, highly technical schemes with multiple interlocking parts that enabled them to do things like get close enough to the Vice President to deliver him a fatal electric shock. And of course, we can't close Guantanamo and house the prisoners now there in supermax prisons in the United States, from which no inmate has ever escaped, because they're terrorists, and who knows what super-powers they might have developed in the fantastically well-equipped lab in their hollowed-out-mountain lair? 1 

1 I joke, but do you remember Bin Laden's mountain fortress? It was quite a remarkable feat of engineering—check out this conversation between Tim Russert and Donald Rumsfeld, going over all its amazing details. "A ventilation system!" marveled Russert. "The entrances large enough to drive trucks and even tanks!" Even computer systems and telephone systems. It's a very sophisticated operation!" "Oh, you bet," responded the Secretary of Defense. "This is serious business. And there's not one of those. There are many of them." You may also remember that the mountain fortress never existed. It was all made up.

It's amazing alright. Go read the story of how this particular piece of bullshit made it out of Rumsfeld's mouth,  from Edward J Epstein, and how, perhaps even more horrifying, the press ate it up.

Katie Couric's EPA: protecting people from the environment

During the ground zero workers' health story on 60 Minutes last night, Katie Couric actually said to Christie Todd Whitman:

But with all due respect, your job as the head of the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, is to protect people from the environment. Did you really do it?

Seriously.

[Cross-posted at the Daily KOS]

I had to note this here, because my family hates the way I scream at the TV. I think I had an aneurysm when she said that.

How could you better sum up the anthropocentrism that is ruining this world? I know she was trying to pin Whitman, or some such wrestling verb that really doesn't apply, but to reverse the logic behind one of the most important agencies in US history is positively, uh, well, Republican. When the EPA was founded, Republicans still argued that it was in the human interest to protect the environment from us. Now apparently, the EPA is here to buy SurvivaBalls from Halliburton.

Why is it that I, with my little BA in Philosophy and an underpaid existence as a Web Site Promoter, can figure this out, but a network news magazine show can't? I mean, does Couric write this stuff? They must have people who check these things? Right?

I was a union stagehand for 20 years. I worked in news. I lit Cokie Roberts (u~g~g~h~h~h~h~h - shudder like Bart and Lisa imagining Patty and Selma naked). I've smoked cigarettes with Al Michaels (OK, sports are news too). These are capitalist giants practicing corporate-centrism. Don't they realize that it's in their best interests to be accurate? Have they not caught on to the "truthiness" thing?

I could go on, but why? As News Corpse pointed out today, KOS Envy is spreading in the right-wing-bat-shit-crazy-o-sphere, and if they can't see that it's my ability to post this that makes the KOS work, well, fuck 'em.