Awesome news!

We tortured some folks? Awesome! The witty scalawags in charge of Fox News hired a good-looking numbskull named Andrea Tantaros to be one of their hosts. (Her name, incidentally, is an anagram for tan Satan adorer.) When the Senate issued a report on the CIA's use of torture, she offered a highly erudite response:

“The United States of America is awesome, we are awesome,” she said. “But we’ve had this discussion. We’ve closed the book on it, and we’ve stopped doing it. And the reason they want to have this discussion is not to show how awesome we are. This administration wants to have this discussion to show us how we’re not awesome.”

“They apologized for this country, they don’t like this country, they want us to look bad. And all this does is have our enemies laughing at us, that we are having this debate again,” Tantaros added.

I am told that she offered similar sentiments during her job interview: "Okay, like, the CIA is like totally bitchin, okay? And there are like all these people out there who are always ragging on the CIA and stuff? And I'm like, what's up with that?" Then she held her finger in the air and chanted "We're number one! We're number one!"

Roger Ailes heard all of this and said: "Hired!"

By the way, Tan Satan Adorer and other right-wingers are blaming Obama for the release of this report. Why blame him? Did he do anything to pry it loose?

Even the classification stamp is classified. Here is the actual report. It's over 500 pages long and I'm not going to pretend to have read it. But I noticed something odd about the classification stamp: Part of it is blacked out.

Now, there are four basic levels of classification: Confidential, Secret, Top Secret, and Core Secret. (Only ultra-sensitive NSA material is stamped Core Secret.) But within the "Top Secret" classification there are further restrictions. The system is known as Sensitive Compartmented Information. The blacked-out portion may begin with the letters SAR, or Special Access Required, followed by a code name.

My sources tell me that the blacked-out portion reads "SAR-TORTUREDSOMEFOLKS." (Count the spaces. It fits! Awesome, huh?)

You probably didn't know that Barack Obama revamped the classification system not long after taking the oath of office. That's not the sort of thing one normally expects from a Democratic President, is it? I mean, most of the people who voted for Obama probably thought he'd have other priorities, right?

Told you he was spooky.

Another day, another hoax. I should have linked to this story days ago, because it was written by one of my favorite human beings on this planet, Maram Susli, a.k.a. Syrian Girl. (It still feels weird to refer to her by her real name.) This story is particularly meaningful to me because I've been paying a lot of attention to the role of "hoaxlore" in our politics.

Many mainstream media websites helped a fake video go viral this month. The video showing a young Syrian boy running through sniper fire to save a little girl, was exposed as a fake when the Norwegian producer Lars Klevberg made the fact public. One of the stated aims of the Norwegian film makers was to “see how the media would respond to a fake video.” This article examines how that experiment went.

The western press very quickly accepted the video as real and used it to support the US administration’s narrative on Syria. Many top US news sources began to spread the story. Even though the producer said he explicitly added big hints that the video was fake, like the children surviving multiple gun shots.

Propagating false stories on Syria, is nothing new for the western press. In the lead up to the conflict many stories were exposed as frauds, such as the Anti-government activist “Gay Girl in Damascus” which turned out to be a middle-aged American man in Scotland. Syrian Danny Abdul Dayem which was frequently interviewed by CNN was using fake gun fire and flames in his interviews.

Let's talk about that "Gay Girl" blog. First, an apology: I should have discussed the thing at length back in 2011, when the deception came to light.

Lemme tell ya, that bogusblog was a real piece of work. If you don't know the story, go here and then here.

Basically, the Gay Girl bogusblog told the story of a young lesbian named Amina who was being oppressed by the consummately evil Assad regime. Eventually, Amina was "kidnapped" by government thugs -- an announcement which led to international howls of outrage against Assad.

But the whole thing was bullsquat.

I can't easily believe that the author of the hoax, Tom MacMaster, was in it purely for the lulz, although that's his story and he's sticking to it.

MacMaster may have continued to use sockpuppets after the hoax was exposed. On 24 June, someone posted defensive comments on Mondoweiss from the same IP address associated with “Amina Arraf.” MacMaster denied making the comments himself but concedes that he enlisted friends to defend his reputation online.

Now let's turn to a Daily Mail story from three years ago:

In his post today MacMaster, writing from Istanbul in Turkey where he is on holiday with his wife Britta Froelicher, admitted his narrative was fictional.

Istanbul? How many Americans go to college in Edinburgh (at the age of 40) and vacation in freakin' Istanbul?

Moon of Alabama asked the right question: Who financed this guy?

A forty year old man who is still working on his master degree, married to a wife who is also yet to finish her academic degree. They both travel multiple times to Turkey, Syria and Jordan. He owns a house.

The question the WaPo reporter, and other media accounts on the story, do not answer is: Who is financing the MacMasters?

It is not normal for someone being forty to still work on a master degree. It is not normal for a pair who still are going to school to travel multiple times to Jordan, Syria and Turkey. It is not normal to become rich enough tio buy a house by being a Middle East peace activist. Unless of course one gets paid to be exactly that.

Pinky, are you thinking what I'm thinking...?

Nazi gun control. We are forever being told (by guys like this) that the Holocaust happened because Hitler instituted strict gun control. That theory has been challenged.

Recently, I went through A.J. Weberman's uploads on Scribd. If you don't recognize the name, Weberman's an old school JFK researcher. Although he's a bit of an odd duck, he has some amazing files, and I'm very grateful that he has seen fit to share his cache of strange items. (Weberman is also a strong Zionist. I mention this fact because some of my readers may feel tempted to say something inane about the image below.)

One of his uploads is a complete 1940 issue of an obnoxious little publication called Der Stürmer. I didn't know that this magazine carried ads, but it did, and one of those ads features...wait for it...guns for sale. See below.

Could one order firearms via the mail in Nazi Germany...? Awesome!