How DARE he?

Bush's "mystery bulge" came up, in a roundabout way, on the Daily Howler site yesterday. Bob Somerby had a good -- but not good enough -- response to a bit of inanity offered by Dana Milbank of the Washington Post.

Milbank plays the misleading game of pretending that we cannot denounce the sins of the right without mentioning an equivalent "leftist" sin -- even when such "equivalence" requires a seriously strained argument. (Writers for the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times often fall into this same trap.)

Somerby:

In Sunday's Outlook section, Milbank confesses to what his headline calls a "bias for mainstream news." The scribe's worry? "Partisans on the left and right have formed cottage industries devoted to discrediting what they dismissively call the 'mainstream media,'" he writes....

Somerby then offers this quote from Milbank (March 20):

Consider a poll two weeks before the 2004 election by the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes: The survey found that 72 percent of President Bush's supporters believed that, at the time of the U.S. invasion, Iraq had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction or at least major illegal weapons programs. It also found that 75 percent of Bush voters believed that Iraq either gave al Qaeda "substantial support" or was directly involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Further, majorities of Bush supporters believed that U.S. weapons inspector Charles Duelfer and the 9/11 commission backed them up on these points.

So far, so good. Numerous progressives have made similar observations. But then, as Somerby points out, the rules of the mainstream game now force Milbank to seek out an "equivalent" left-wing delusion or two.

Milbank:

This is not to pick on Bush followers. Many on the left harbor their own fantasies that they consider fact -- about how Bush knew of 9/11 in advance, or how he was coached during one of the presidential debates via a transmitter between his shoulder blades.

Y'see how it works? The commentary about "bulge-gate" found on this humble blog (and on a number of others web sites, some of which are listed to your left) offer a sort of balance to the mass hallucination that Saddam had WMDs.

If radio rightists convinced the American people to buy into a phony tale about WMDs -- well, hell, that's all right. Because, y'see, during the campaign there was this gol-durned librul blogger named Joseph Cannon, and he and his librul pals were saying some mighty weird stuff about Bush's back. So, you know, it all evens out.

At least, that's what Dana Milbank wants his readers to believe.

Somerby responds thus to this suggestion:

But how many people "on the left" believe that Bush "knew of 9/11 in advance?" Is it anything like 75 percent, the number Milbank has just cited in discussing those disinformed Bush supporters? And how many people "on the left" actually believe, as a matter of fact, that Bush was coached during that debate? In these cases, Milbank cites no polling data, because there is no poll on the face of the earth which would produce anything like the type of equivalence he so slavishly seeks here. Could liberals be as factually deluded, one fine day, as conservatives currently are? Of course they could, but that day hasn't come.

Fair enough. But I'd like to add another very basic point.

We know that Saddam Hussein did not have Weapons of Mass Desruction because hordes of inspectors combed Iraq, both before and after the invasion. And they did not find a thing.

How many inspectors (other than John Kerry, at the end of the second debate) got a chance to feel Bush's back?

I do not know how many liberals, or non-liberals, share my view that George W. Bush received prompting via a transmitter/receiver. But I do know this:

1. No evidence (other than Karl Rove's silly blandishments) disproves the "prompergate" scenario.

2. By comparison, we have a ton of evidence disproving the claim that Iraq housed nukes and CB weaponry.

3. A NASA scientist has confirmed that Bush was wearing something decidedly odd on his back. And his work is hardly the only evidence in favor of "bulge-gate."

4. Even if that NASA expert is mistaken, and even if all my scribblings on the bulge are one day proven wrong, nobody has died as a result of anything I've written. By comparison, many thousands of people have died because Americans were suckered into accepting falsehoods about Iraqi WMDs.

You want to know the consequence of the lies told by Rush, Rove, Dubya and company? Look at this.

LOOK AT IT!

How DARE Milbank suggest that anything I've written is equivalent to the WMD lie?

As for Bush foreknowledge of 9/11: Is Milbank trying to convince us that the infamous Presidential Daily Briefing of August 6 was imaginary? W may not have known the precise details as to where and when, but he damn well should have known that we were about to be hit.