According to this, Bush's advisers steered him away from making a complete fool of himself (again). Film at 11! http://t.co/jKmtNC4XYg
— Daniel Larison (@DanielLarison) October 16, 2014
Eli Lake, accredited Wingnut Wurlitzer puke funnel, wrote the article:
… In an interview with The Daily Beast, former Senator Rick Santorum said he and his staff began receiving photographs of discarded Sarin and Mustard shells from U.S. soldiers in 2004. Two years later, when he was up for re-election, Santorum even went public with some of this information in a press conference disclosing a Pentagon report that found 500 chemical weapons shells had been found in Iraq…
But at least in 2005 and 2006 the Bush White House wasn’t interested. “We don’t want to look back,” Santorum recalled Rove as saying (though Santorum stressed he was not quoting verbatim conversations he had more than eight years ago). “I will say that the gist of the comments from the president’s senior people was ‘we don’t want to look back, we want to look forward.’”…
Santorum on Thursday stood by that claim. “There was no active chemical weapons operation in Iraq, that doesn’t mean there were no chemical weapons,” he said. “That was the point we were making. It’s clear from the New York Times article that the military as well as the administration didn’t want to have that conversation because they missed it.”…
… including a special guest appearance by our old friend Pete Hoekstra (see: Hoekstroika):
… In an interview Thursday, Hoekstra declined to name Bush administration officials with whom he spoke. But he said he felt stonewalled during his own investigation in 2005 and 2006 into the issue. “This was an active investigation by the intelligence committee and they chose not to answer our questions truthfully and fully,” Hoekstra said….
Tell me again how “nobody” takes Luzer Rih Sanctorum seriously. I’m just barely old enough to remember when RWNJs used the magical phrase Matsu and Quemoy un-ironically, and I seriously think Santorum is his generation’s Dick Nixon. Sure, he’s a twisted little sociopath that you wouldn’t want as a neighbor (much less an in-law), but there’s a negotiable bloc of American voters who want to be represented by a twisted little sociopath “they can count on” (to punish all the happy, successful, smiling folk who are not like them — and Rick Santorum).
Omnes Omnibus
Hey, I have been saying that he is my pick for 2016 GOP candidate for a while. He has a credible case for next man up.
Violet
@Omnes Omnibus: Yep, Santorum has the best claim on “his turn” status. Paul Ryan has the other claim, but his isn’t as strong because he handpicked by Romney while Santorum won actual primary votes and came in second.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Omnes Omnibus: He came damn close to fatally wounding Romney– note I say wounding, not beating. When Santorum started to roll up a few primaries, the money people were panicking. Without Romney’s money bombs and Santorum’s gaffe about JFK, the “Draft Jebbie/Daniels/pleasegodanybodybuthim!” movement could have made for a real interesting convention. I looked it up a while back, IIRC even after the Kennedy thing he still came damn close to winning the Illinois primary.
Violet
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I wonder if he’s “conservative enough” this time around. Every four years the GOP base seems to get crazier. Stronger purity tests. We all joke about how Reagan couldn’t get get out of primary season in today’s GOP, but hell, I don’t think John McCain from 2008 could these days. Not sure Romney from 2012 could now. They’re looking for platinum crazy.
The Pale Scot
IMHO, war gases are not WMDs, such as the elemental gases like Chlorine, Arsenic and Sulfer (mustard). If we’re going to classify them as such, then napalm, white phosphorus and depleted Ur munitions should have the same designation. They have the same effective range and persistence (except depleted U, a heavy metal far more toxic than lead) as the banned gases. Even nerve gas is more likely to be used to deny an area to occupation than as a weapon of assault.
High yield nukes and bio weapons are the real WMDs. As Iran and Texas have shown, purifying Plutonium or not killing yourself working with a bioweapons is a lot easier said then done.
Viva BrisVegas
Santorum, the lying weasel, is trying to make a point which pointless.
Everybody knew that there were improperly disposed of chemical weapons in Iraq in 2003. As somebody once said, the US had the receipts. The claim from the White House was that there was an active chemical weapons program, when the lying scumsucking turds knew that there was no evidence of it. Doubtless the reason the military were trying to keep such garbage grade weaponry out of the news probably has more to do with downplaying the “Made in USA” labels.
Trying to claim that discarded chemical weapons in Iraq were unknown in 2003 is a lie. Trying to claim that this somehow justifies the Bush Iraq War strategy is a pathetic farce.
Santorum running interference for the Bush White House yet again, is just another example of how completely the MSM is mesmerised by right wing bullshit artists.
Amir Khalid
I’m guessing that back in ’12 only Santorum’s campaign org being marginally less unprofessional than the others’ got him as far as he got. It certainly wasn’t his personality or his politics. Were I American and a Republican, I’d pick Santorum’s campaign org to run Mr. Anyother Republican for President.
? Martin
@Violet: Ted Cruz is the baseline now. He’s the Rome with coffee candidate, where dipshits like Gohmert are Rome without coffee. Nobody cares about Paris any more.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
can’t decide if I’m pissed at Tom Harkin or not
The people who gave him that money gave it to him, and maybe the Harkin Insitute will do great things. But jesus, maybe half a million to help Democrats defend the things you care about?
trollhattan
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I vote “yes.” Douche move, senator. That’s a lot of seed corn.
cckids
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: @trollhattan:
I agree. Yikes, Harkin. It isn’t as though Braley has an unwinnable race, FFS.
Democrats. Writing the how-to manual for circular firing squads since forever.
EconWatcher
This whole issue of the old chemical weapons was fully aired around 2005 to 2006. I remember it well, because of a remarkable performance by Kucinich on one of the Sunday talk shows. I’m not at all impressed with Kucinich, but I have to give him full props on this one:
Some wingnut Congressman was on, holding up a picture of some chemical rocket that they found and dug up, portraying it with high drama as proof that there were WMD all along. Kucinich asked if he could see the photo. The wingnut triumphantly passed it over to him. Kucinich then asked the cameraman to zoom in on the picture. It show a rusted, cracked vessel sitting deep in a hole in the dirt; it looked like some display from a World War I museum. Then Kucinich looked into the camera and said, “We went to war over this?”
The wingnut Congressman immediately began sputtering and backtracking. Completely pwned, as the kids used to say.
Chris
So, after years of not being able to shut up about the WMDs that were totally there even before they had any evidence and muzzling all contrary opinion to the point of pretty much ordering the CIA to tell them what they wanted to hear, and then creating their own CIA under Feith and Wolfowitz’s direct control to be the Fox News to the CIA’s mainstream media… the Bush administration suddenly about-faced and decided that they were going to selflessly refrain from airing hard evidence of WMDs once they had it. Uh huh. Yeah.
Pull the other one, it’s got bells on.
Chris
@Violet:
For quite a few of them, Mac and Mittens were never “true conservatives” in the first place, and especially in Mac’s case, his defeat was greeted with a chorus of “he lost because he wasn’t a true conservative!”
I think a lot of “no true conservative,” though, is just their way of dealing with their ideology’s failures. Bush wasn’t branded “not a true conservative” because he failed to Be Conservative, but because his being conservative resulted in disaster rather than the paradise they expected, and the only way to rationalize that without having to self-examine is by dismissing it as counterrevolutionary sabotage. It’s not that their basic beliefs change, so much as those beliefs keep failing and they keep needing to find scapegoats.
MattR
@Chris: I can completely understand it because it didn’t help advance the narrative that the Iraq invasion was justified because Sadaam was an imminent threat due to his active WMD program. If anything it helps the war’s critics if all you can find are old, decrepit weapons. (as I think EconWatcher’s Kucinich story illustrates) And airing the evidence of these decades old WMD’s would also create an opportunity for the public to learn (or be reminded) that Iraq obtained them with the help of people like Cheney and Rumsfeld
Tommy
@MattR: I thought invading Iraq was a good idea at the time. I was so wrong. So wrong. I try very hard to understand when I am wrong and learn from my mistakes.
Villago Delenda Est
Well, yeah. Germany has no active chemical weapons program, nor does Britain or France, yet they’re still finding munitions nearly a century old all across northern France from The Great War.
So your point is bullshit, shitstain.
Chris
@MattR:
Exactly.
(To clarify, the disbelief was aimed at Santorum and the rest of the “there totally WERE WMDs!” crowd, if there’s any confusion).
Death Panel Truck
We couldn’t possibly be so lucky as to have Santorum for 2016. No one loves us that much. No one.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Death Panel Truck: I hear on the TVMachine that Mitt will run again if they ask him nicely.
bago
I blame barney.
Amir Khalid
@BillinGlendaleCA:
So someone needs to ask Mitt nicely. The Badly Programmed Robot Politician is always amusing to watch, and Rick Scott can’t be the only one.
Tony J
You know, if you ever need to show a friend or loved one a really concrete example of wingnut insanity and boneheaded myopia, you could do a lot worse than pass on the comment thread following the report in the (Even the Liberal) New Republic someone linked to yesterday. It’s just… typical.
For example, they already knew all about these finds. Oh yeah, Fox News told them years ago, so this is all old news and further proof that the Liberal Media was deliberately suppressing evidence that Bush was right to invade Iraq. It’s also definitely, incontrovertibly and absolutely true that the entire anti-war case back in 2002/3 was based on the false claim that poor little Iraq did not have any WMD at all, ever. Anyone who says otherwise is just a lying liar. Plus, even though these discoveries of old chemicals and hardware prove they were 100% right about Iraq anyway, they’re only half the story. The – real – scandal is that all of the truly dangerous stuff was shipped across the border into Syria and is now being dug up and used by ISIS! Thanks, Obummer!
All of this toxic stew of lies, revisions, back-slapping and heh-indeeding comes marinated in a piquant sauce of ground-up hate and pan-fried resentment. Every comment just seethes with anger at everyone outside the wingnut bubble for conspiring against them. They were, are, and always will be right about everything.
But the bit about soldiers poisoned by the chemicals being told to shut up? You know, the actual point of the story they’re commenting on? Not a single mention. Never brought up. They just don’t care.
Fred
The thing about Santorum is he’s absolutely sincere. He really believes just what he says.
The right really doesn’t care if someones policy ideas are crap. They don’t believe in government so policy is irrelevant. They just go gooey for someone who can look ’em square in the camera lens and state their BS case with real conviction. Santorum’s got that bit down plus he’s got that square jawed thing and he does solid righteously pissed off talking through clenched teeth.
Make no mistake, just cause Santorum is wing-nut crazy don’t sell him short. He’s one serious dangerous sociopath and with stars aligned he could waltz into the oval office.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Fred: with his rather unfortunate internet name association? That’s a pretty damning weakness in a politician to let that happen to himself.
Chris
@Tony J:
One of my bigger “this country is screwed” moments came when a conversation with a conservative friend yielded the fact that (this was in 2009) she actually didn’t realize we hadn’t found WMDs in Iraq – and when informed of that, took a few seconds to go “well, he must have moved them to Syria then.”*
The reason for the “this country is screwed” moment is that this was a person who’d just gotten her degree in international relations/security studies, if anything with better grades than mine, at a university that definitely didn’t lean conservative – and had nonetheless managed to keep her oblivious FoxBot bubble intact and unsoiled by such inconvenient information. And she’s now an analyst in some department of the Pentagon or other.
Ever since, it’s made me wonder just how many blissfully ignorant cretins like her are in the system. Not political appointees at the top protected by powerful friends, which I always knew existed – ordinary people, recruited in the ordinary way, rising up through the educational and professional ranks in the ordinary way, but who’ve nevertheless drank so much of the kool aid from the way they were raised that they’re as clueless about their own subject matter as any George Bush or Sarah Palin.
Honus
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: name association? We elected a president with the name Hussein Obama. I thought that was just incredible at the time. Santorum is nothing next to that, even with the urban dictionary.
Uncle Cosmo
@The Pale Scot:
Depends on the variety. (TL;DR version: VX & thickened soman are area-denial agents, sarin is not.)
Mustard is the original area-denial chemical agent for two reasons: it persists in the environment & it attacks the skin as well as eyes & mucous membranes. Re persistence, note that sulfur mustard isn’t a “gas” at ambient temperatures–hell, its melting point is 60 degrees Fahrenheit–its volatility is low so it doesn’t evaporate, & it’s damn near non-degradable in the environment. (US programs to dispose of mustard munitions & storage containers found no better way than to incinerate the lot. And there were cases of injuries to Belgian farmers cutting down trees who were injured by exposure to mustard trapped in the tree rings as late as the 1960s.). Pulmonary effects means your troops can’t traverse the area with only goggles & respirators–full body protection (what the army calls Mission Oriented Protective Posture [MOPP] 4) is required, & then that has to be decontaminated or discarded.
Getting back to nerve agents: Sarin is not an area-denial weapon, even though it’s liquid in the ambient environment (melting point -69 F, boiling point 316 F), because it’s highly volatile–in fact about as close as you can get to being a gas without actually being a gas. War planners would use it in areas designated for occupation or transit, to kill or scatter enemy troops & move in their own quickly. VX and thickened soman* are on the order of mustard in persistence & percutaneous hazard but much, much more lethal–soak a territory in either & no one in his or her right mind would send troops through there.
(* The last & most lethal of the agents discovered by the Nazis. Like sarin, it’s made by reacting an alcohol with the precursor methylphosphonyl difluoride [“difluor”]; unlike sarin, it’s hella hard to make because the pinacolyl alcohol needed is itself difficult to produce. The Soviets managed it; the Yanks went the VX route.)
Tony J
@Chris:
WTF?
The only answer I can come up with that even remotely makes sense of that degree of willful stupidity is that she was just fecking with you.
“And she’s now an analyst in some department of the Pentagon or other.”
OTOH, that is genuinely frightening.
Chris
@Tony J:
Nope, trust me, she wasn’t. And yes, it is genuinely frightening.
Good Times
Eli Lake’s Al Qaeda “Legion of Doom Conference Call”
CONGRATULATIONS!
@Chris: All of them, Charlie.
I work in that “system” and I’d say about 95% of the folks in it are trusting, unquestioning believers in whatever they are told by their media of choice. It might surprise you that more than half of them are not Fox watchers, but CNN. The puke funnel is different but the results, oddly, are exactly the same.
A fairly substantial number of them consider themselves liberal.
Chris
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
I think there’s a people in Washington who are “liberal” in a West Wing kind of way – e.g. not especially radical, just technocrats who want to keep the government machinery running, and may have absorbed far too many right wing that have gone mainstream for their own good (free trade, all good; school reform, good; foreign policy, all about sending in the Marines; etc). It’s just that they live in a world where simply wanting the government to work at all has been branded an act of socialism (the friggin Post Office gets attacked as such, for crying out loud).
Long story short, it really doesn’t take much to be “liberal” in this country.
Slugger
It would have been amusing if Cheney would have held up one of these gas containing artillery shells during 2004 with a big made in the US label on it. Saddam’s arsenal was made in the West and sold to him by Rumsfeld among others.
Calouste
@? Martin:
Rick: “We’ll always have Paris.”
Calouste
@BillinGlendaleCA: The Marchioness de Romney said that the family was fed up with running for office, which I take to mean that they can easily be convinced to do it again, but that the campaign funds are a bit starved at the moment, and they are not going to spend any more of their own money on it. The peasants should be so grateful that they have the Marquis ruling over them!
Epicurus
@Calouste:
The lady doth protest too much, methinks. Hell, let’s go for the gold; Romney/Santorum 2016!!! Cuz you know the Rethugs really want to lose 48 states.
JAFD
@Uncle Cosmo:
Note that, chemically, there is not much difference between modern insecticides (read the warning labels) and nerve gases. Nearly any second-world with an agricultural chemical industry and some chemical engineers can be producing nerve gases in a couple of months. Remember Bhopal.