Obviously, there’s lots to make fun of Michael Ledeen’s hoax post and many have made fun of it. But not many have touched on this claim he makes:
I’ve done satirical pieces myself, and I know how they can take off. I once wrote one that said that Bill Casey did not die, and was hiding in a bunker under the St Andrews golf course from which he was running Mikhail Gorbachev. I thought it was obviously satirical, but it went like wildfire all over the world. And that was in the days before the Internet.
Is it possible that this really “went like wildfire all over the world”? Could people possibly have been that dumb 20 years ago?
Update. I can find no evidence that this happened.
Jody
Whadda ya mean 20 years ago? People are that dumb NOW. Why would the group that swept Reagan and Bush the Elder into office be any smarter?
jeffreyw
Sure, but more likely he is lying now.
soonergrunt
Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. I’ve never heard of anything even remotely like that. Of course, Casey died when I was sixteen.
smiley
The internet, or something like it, has been around since the early ’80s. Compuserve, AOL, etc.
OT, but this is an outrage!
DemonDem
I don’t know about what rumors were going around 20 years ago, but I think the more likely scenario is that this guy is following the GOP maxim that if you say anything with enough conviction, enough times, someone somewhere will buy it no matter how false/ ridiculous / batshit the claim may be…
General Winfield Stuck
Back then, I think it took 80 days, give or take.
DemonDem
Perhaps I’ve overstated – apologies…
Martin
Shorter Ledeen:
I’m a douchebag, but I’ve *made* douchebags all over the world, like wildfire, when it was harder to out people as douchebags, so my douchebaggery today is totally reasonable.
smiley
@soonergrunt:
Didn’t I see you at the GOS some years ago?
MikeJ
The great gazoogle gives a gillion hits for this particular article where he claims to have written something 20 years ago, but doesn’t turn up anything I can find referencing an article from back then.
People love hoaxes. When they come out people talk about them a lot. Hard top believe this masterstroke that the whole world fooled would disappear without a trace.
Probably just a liberal media conspiracy to deny Ledeen’s genius. Or is that super-genius?
mellowjohn
NOTHING written by michael ledeen has ever spread “like wildfire” around the block, let alone around the world.
dmsilev
You need to quote Digby here, who dug this up from the NY Daily News:
-dms
Andre
People generally aren’t dumb. They’re just lazy and/or apathetic and/or busy, and that affects their level of curiosity. If people don’t feel personally affected by an issue, they seldom raise enough interest to investigate whether claims are true or false.
…and I’m being a nerd in a thread where I should be making fun of Ledeen. Um, that guy is a dork.
demkat620
Ledeen is an assclown. I have know idea what he is talking about. Nobody ever though Bill Casey was running Gorbachev.
Again, why are these people still paid to say anything? Remember when he said he had good sources tellling him that Khameni was dead?
Last I checked that fucker is still running Iran.
GregB
Who doesn’t remember the great Shecky Ledeen hoax of 1989?
Only those without their fingers on the pulse of the nation.
-G
GregB
Oh yeah, and Bill Casey is running Ayotallah Khameini.
-G
Ash Can
Let’s see…20 years ago…I don’t remember anything this idiot is talking about. And the guy I was dating then (who is now my husband), along with a few of my pals at work, kept me abreast of the developments, such as they were, on the Internet, such as it was. And I read the Chicago Tribune every day, and I do mean every page.
Guess this poor loser didn’t make anywhere remotely near the splash he thinks he did. Kinda pathetic, really.
Martin
Wait, does this mean BOB is Michael Ledeen? I could buy that.
calipygian
There was no evidence that Manucher Ghorbanifar was in any way remotely sympathetic to anyone or anything other than himself, much less US policy vis a vis Iran, yet that ass clown Ledeen not just once, but twice tried to bring this probable Iranian double agent into the highest levels of decision making.
Ledeen is a best a gullible buffoon. At worst, he is an Iranian agent.
Just Some Fuckhead
Holeeee Fuck, Bill Casey is alive and living under a golf course where he runs Mikhail Gorbachev’s speaking tour??? I gotta facebook this.
AhabTRuler
Hey, how could that happen? Al Gore invented the internet back in the Seventies!
joes527
Dude.
The claim that he wrote the satirical article was the satire.
Try to keep up.
Just Some Fuckhead
Holeee Fuck, Ledeen made a satirical claim that he wrote a satirical article???? I gotta facebook this.
Jon H
Provides useful context to the wingnut claims that ‘everybody’ in DC knew Valerie Plame was CIA.
soonergrunt
@smiley: I still post there under that handle. Were you the AG?
DougJ
The claim that he wrote the satirical article was the satire.
So if I write a “satire” in which I refer to an article, that article is, by definition satire?
I’m reeling.
Jon H
The last thing Ledeen spread like wildfire was the clap at Plato’s Retreat with John Bolton.
BruceJ
Yep.
During Gulf War I, the media reported several times that one of the ways we had defeated Saddam was by embedding a virus in printers we’d sold him. This got passed along as gospel, but was, in reality, an Infoworld April Fools joke…
aimai
I saw that ledeen bit and thought “what a solipsistic little poseur…” you know, no one cared about casey before he died, and certainly not after. It really was no “Franco, still dead” moment of satire. But in any event, I doubt anything like a ledeen manufactured satire/rumor ever spread like wildfire except in his inflated imagination. I presume that he’s not outright lying–I imagine that he said something bitchy to a friend at a cocktail party and that this remark sank like a stone right then and there. In Ledeen’s imagination, in which he bestrides the world like a colossus, his long forgotten and entirely lame bit of snark had a life of its own. Surely not.
aimai
bayville
Funny you brought this up. I have spent the better part of three hours today researching the Casey tale.
Even read some excerpts from Woodward’s book on Casey.
Nada. Nothing.
Must have been a prank that spread like wild fire through the Leeden compound. But I haven’t given up yet.
Violet
I hadn’t actually read the hoax apology post until today. And found this:
What the hell? Apologizing to the president, sure, because he passed off lies as truths about the man. Even to Joe Klein, who was unwittingly involved in the false story and for the same reason. But to Rush Limbaugh? Limbaugh himself did no fact checking and just spewed out the lie, falling for it hook, line and sinker.
Why the hell does this guy have to apologize to Rush? Because everyone right of Atilla the Hun apologizes to Rush for the slightest thing? I guess so. Reminds me of the guy Cheney shot apologizing to Dick for Dick shooting him.
Gawd, these people are effed up.
Jon H
I’m sure Cliff May believed it and told all his friends, who laughed at him behind his back.
David
That’s written as if he’s typing up his lie as he thinks of it then hits *send* before bothering to read it.
smiley
@soonergrunt:
AG? Don’t know what you’re referring to there exactly . I just remember that series, and the comments, because it caught my eye after I moved to a coastal town in a hurricane-pron state in a hurricane-active year.
calipygian
Here is a great example of what a fucking joke Michael Ledeen is:
Who had a hand in creating Hezbollah? That would be the current darling of the American Right, Iranian “opposition” candidate Mir Hussein Mousavi.
Oh, about Iran-Contra…who was making contact with the man who was the boss of the Patron Saint of Hezbollah?
That fuckwad Michael Ledeen…who can’t quite remember who killed 241 Marines 25+ years ago in Beirut.
I wonder what Ledeen’s cut of the transaction was?
Deschanel
I honestly cannot remember who Bill Casey was or is. Why would people all over the world care 20 years ago? Ledeen’s just ridiculous.
Right wing sorts have the most godawful senses of humor- nonexistent, actually. He doesn’t seem to know what “satire” even means.
joes527
@DougJ:
Trenchant satire!
(or utter bulshit, I tend to confuse the two)
MikeJ
He was director of the CIA. People would have cared had he faked his death.
calipygian
Bill Casey was the drunken incompetent who stole Jimmy Carter’s briefing book before a debate and rigged the Iran hostage release to benefit Reagan. He was rewarded with a position as head of the CIA. Right before he was scheduled to give testimony in Iran Contra, he contracted brain cancer and died.
valdivia
OT and I know we hashed this out in the other thread but this post by Booman this afternoon explains very clearly what all the brouhaha was this weekend about the PO. Also note this second post making clear that backing Reid in this move is probably the biggest gamble of his presidency. I sense not many people get why this is a gamble especially in Reid’s hands.
AhabTRuler
@calipygian: Yet another Cold Warrior(TM) whose ghost we must suffer.
Dom Phenom
i have to hand it to him, if he’s going for the meta-hoax, that’s pretty brilliant. maybe the “fact” that he “once wrote one that said that Bill Casey did not die, and was hiding in a bunker under the St Andrews golf course from which he was running Mikhail Gorbachev” and that “it went like wildfire all over the world” will soon also be picked up by Limbaugh and believed in wingnut circles.
calipygian
OT, but John Aravosis obviously doesn’t read any Liberal blogs if he doesn’t know what “the village” is.
what a wanker.
Anne Laurie
If Michael Ledeen says it, it is a lie. Simple as that. Should a soaking-wet Michael Ledeen walk into the room and say that it’s raining, you should assume that he’s trying to sell you an undersized umbrella with broken spokes for the low, low price of only $9,000,000,000…. and it’s probably a beautiful sunny day. Because Michael Ledeen is always trying to sell something, and his chosen method of salesmanship is flagrant, unbelievable lying. Michael Ledeen seems to have watched the “Joe Isuzu” liar commercials back in the 1980s and decided, “At last, a vocation to suit my natural talents!”
smiley
@Anne Laurie:
Lets not forget that he told Ron Reagan last week that his (Reagan’s) Father would be ashamed of him. Like he would know.
Comrade Darkness
@calipygian: According to the wikipedia: Notably, Casey oversaw covert assistance to the mujahadeen resistance in Afghanistan, with a budget of over $1 billion
Gee, that would be the wonderful era of the u.s. outfitting/funding/arming Osama bin Laden, right?
The shit from republican administrations stinks for decades, doesn’t it?
Anne Laurie
@aimai:
Well, to be fair, Gore Vidal did suggest that Bush the First’s CIA cronies killed Casey before he could outdo Lee Atwater by actually detailing the political crimes leading to his deathbed apology. But then, Vidal knew how satire actually works… unlike Ledeen, who’s a devout and committed liar, but one with no competence in his chosen field.
geg6
Ledeen seriously believes that? That anything other than the fact that he was right there in the middle of an illegal arms deal with Iran to benefit rightwing murderers? Other than that, I don’t remember hearing Michael Ledeen’s name come up in any major outlet for anything until the other day when all this idiocy broke. And believe me, if there had been any rumors that Casey was the runner for Gorbachev, I’d have known. That was when I was a TA in my poli sci dept, where I taught a class about the politics of the Soviet Union for the Eastern European studies section. So I’d certainly have heard that rumor. And laughed heartily at it with my colleagues.
soonergrunt
@smiley: The AG=The Alpha Geek. He doesn’t post anymore over there, and as that was the referenced diary, I thought you just might be him.
bayville
.
William Casey was a true Nixonian character, a combination of Ralph Peters, Henry Paulson and Michael Leeden who, oh by the way, happened to run the CIA during the Iran-Contra scandal (circa. 1986-88).
Casey died in the middle of Senate hearings on the scandal. His reign at the CIA is literally one of the most hideous chapters in U.S. foreign policy history, particularly with regard to Central America.
To show you how these crazy right-wingers keep getting recycled, Casey’s right-hand man, a thoroughly unethical jerk off named Herb Mayer (Karl Rove times 10), is in the news this week because NJ gubernatorial candidate Chris Christie allegedly recommended Mayer for a post in his U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Scary.
ihop
the first time i saw the block quote above i read “bill casey” as “bill cosby”.
makes the whole thing a bit different. now i’m sad because i could see mikhail doing the whole “jell-o pudding pops” routine with a sly refence to his ink stain.
calipygian
@smiley: I know its hard to tell all those crazy ass grey beard motherfuckers apart, but that was Frank Gaffney that needs a hard kick in the junk from Ron Reagan.
AhabTRuler
@bayville: The real problem is that more of these guys won’t follow Casey’s excellent example.
smiley
@soonergrunt: Nope. I’ve never commented or posted there. When I tried to register years ago, it failed. Maybe someone had already used my handle. I decided I don’t care enough to think up a new handle (I visit daily, though).
geg6
AhabTRuler @53: This. LOL
Anne Laurie
Well, among other lowlights, he was one of the loudest defenders of the ‘Saddam has yellowcake’ pre-war Italian forgeries. And he was responsible for getting his newly-MBAed daughter Simone installed as the chief financial officer of the “Iraqi Reconstruction Authority”, where she proceeded to “lose” nine billion U.S. dollars — not misappropriate, not waste, literally lose a warehouseful of shrinkwrapped U.S. currency. Or so she claimed, and the money’s never been recovered, at least by the proper authorities.
Basically, Michael Ledeen is the Serious Academic version of Jonah Goldberg. When the history of neoconservatism is written, Ledeen’s career will be used as an example of just how badly the naked pursuit of political influence poisoned political-science academic doctrine in the final decades of the twentieth century.
smiley
@calipygian: You’re right. They are hard to tell apart but not just because the the beard, but also because of the shit they say.
Zach
He also failed to notice that the entire site is otherwise very left-leaning, which is evidenced by glancing at literally any inch of the page.
Quicksand
The overarching principle here is “it doesn’t matter whether it actually happened or not, what’s scary is that IT COULD HAVE.”
kommrade reproductive vigor
Ledeen’s world is flat so rumors travel faster.
calipygian
@Anne Laurie: Not lost. They just had to kick a lot of extra points after throwing for a lot of touchdowns:
Corrupt AND dumb. The only people on the ground dumber were Simone Ledeen and the people who were supposed to be keeping watch.
I wonder what Michael’s cut of that missing 8.8 Billion is.
calipygian
Given his connections to the seamier elements of Italian intelligence, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if he were the perpetrator of the yellowcake hoax.
Start poking around that story and how that story got started (Hint: the letter kind of fell into the hands of an unwitting Italian journalist looking for a scoop) and you’ll see what I mean.
Chris
@ Ann Laurie
Your comment about Leeden being a liar reminded me of the brit guy’s on John Stewarts show’s take on CNN’s news reporting a few weeks ago
“CNN..they are Goat F**kers..They pursue goats for the sole purpose of F**king them”
Nutella
Maybe Ledeen confuses himself with Garry Trudeau? He had Bill Casey as a character in Doonesbury, on his deathbed and long after.
Casey and Cheney have a lot in common. A country that produced those two has a lot to be ashamed of.
calipygian
Michael Ledeen’s son joined the Marine Corps, did a tour in Iraq and came home.
Andrew Bacevich’s kid went to Iraq and never came back. Bacevich got a check.
Just sayin’.
calipygian
OT, but I was looking at some of my old GOS diaries and the “compare the Lie-brul to the Nazi’s and the Commies at the same time” play was always in the book.
In this case, Mark Hemmingway plays it against Hillary.
Obama gets the Mooslim thrown in because of his middle name I guess.
mcd410x
Don’t blame me, I voted for Walnuts!
Deschanel
Sincere thanks to all of you filling me in on Casey, who he was and the signifigance of the timing of his demise. It’s a blank spot to me, the mid-80’s.
But looking back, can you fucking believe the Iran-Contra scandal? That St. Ronnie was so up to his armpits in such sordid dealings? From day one?? Keeping hostages in Iran there til he was sworn in? Absolutely boggles the mind that all this went down the Beltway memory-hole. Yet he’s revered as a great American and President. Just sordid, and goes to show, DC is “wired” for Republicans. Democrats are raked over the coals for personal indiscretions and everything under the sun, really.
Reagan gave us Iran-Contra, W Bush gave us Iraq- yet the Beltway considers all this forgettable and forgiveable. Just boggling, how it works like that.
Anne Laurie
@calipygian:
It wouldn’t surprise me if Ledeen were in on the hoax. But lousy as the forgeries were, they had a sort of surface plausibility that seemed beyond Ledeen’s inventive capabilities. My guess would be that he was an avid supporter of the idea of producing a hoax, and a tireless cheerleader of the hoax itself, but the actual forgery was left to some poor middle-management schmucks who gave the Pointy-Haired Bosses exactly as well-thought-out and puncture-proof a story as deserved. It was a weak story, badly thought and very poorly executed, but still more coherent by a factor of ten than the stuff Ledeen’s produced on his own ticket.
Ledeen’s lasting academic notoriety is liable to amount to having given the Doughy Pantload the “serious” germ from which Liberal Fascism was grown like an MRSA virus. And his political fame will have reached its apex in spawning Simone and enabling her criminal career in Iraq.
SiubhanDuinne
Well, Keith certainly had a fine old time with this story on WPITW.
soonergrunt
@Deschanel: It was even more horrifying for those of us who lived those times as they happened.
calipygian
He is also the inspiration for what that vile, insipid product of Lucianne’s putrid womb calls the Ledeen Doctrine:
That is EXACTLY what someone who doesn’t know war from Call of Duty 4 would say.
Jeff Fecke
All I know is this is proof of the self-correcting right-wing blogosphere’s superiority, because while they repeated a lie, they then retracted it while claiming the lie was fake but true, which is totally unlike what CBS did with the TANG memos because Shut Up, that’s why.
Wolverines, also.
thomas Levenson
The key detail is that Ledeen writes that Limbaugh “had many wise things to say about” the Constitution and the founders and all that…
Which is dispositive as far as I am concerned. Anyone who associates the quality of wisdom with the performance artist formerly known as Rush deserves every last ounce of ridicule the world can spare to douse him with.
de stijl
Ledeen is a sociopath.
Always has been. Always will be.
PS – research the name of his blog (Faster, Please!) if you want one of those laugh /”OMG that’s abhorrent!” moments.
de stijl
Okay you’re lazy, so here’s the Ledeen quote he loved so much he named his blog for it:
“Scowcroft has managed to get one thing half right, even though he misdescribes it. He fears that if we attack Iraq ‘I think we could have an explosion in the Middle East. It could turn the whole region into a caldron and destroy the War on Terror.’ One can only hope that we turn the region into a cauldron, and faster, please. If ever there were a region that richly deserved being cauldronized, it is the Middle East today. If we wage the war effectively, we will bring down the terror regimes in Iraq, Iran, and Syria, and either bring down the Saudi monarchy or force it to abandon its global assembly line to indoctrinate young terrorists. That’s our mission in the war against terror.” [National Review, 8/6/2002]
Fucking sociopath. Pluck out his sociopathic eye and skull fuck him until he is dead. I don’t issue death wishes very often (almost never, actually) but Ledeen is a special, sociopathic, “please die, motherfucker”, case. Fuck you, you psychotic death mongering cunt.
de stijl
More Ledeen happy, fun-time quotes:
“Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.”
Liz
@Violet:
Aye-read the comments from Ledeen’s original post. Comedy gold, that.
Xavier Cugat
A key feature of “Rebunking” is the requisite statement by the rebunkers that “while this has been proven to be false, today’s environment is such that we actually believed it. As such, we take only partial blame for our stupidity.”
Ledeen and Limbaugh both rebunked under this expanded definition.
Ledeen
Limbaugh