I know what it means / but I can’t explain

There seems to be something truly ugly, something truly terrifying brewing in Washington. The beating of drums, the call to arms for bubba, has begun again. And the ramping up of the masses has started. And once again the usual suspects seem to leading the charge to war....Micheal Gordon the writer of said piece has a very dubious past, as you'll see if you read on. And once again they are doing so with a litany of half quotes…unsubstantiated, and from those historically reliable anonymous sources in the Bush administration...and wild claims delivered as fact,

I’ll leave it to Glenn Greenwald to make the very obvious points here: that not only is there absolutely no presented evidence to back up the claims being made by these people (and if it's there, show us please, and show us credible hard evidence), but how complicit mainstream outlets, such as the NYT, have yet to properly atone for the blood on their hands from the last rush to arms. Then follow the link to the Editor and Publisher piece on Michael Gordon’s earlier story from 2002, which contained the now infamous recruiting slogan:

“The first sign of a 'smoking gun,' they argue, may be a mushroom cloud.”, and groan at the gruesome inevitably of it all.

Selling the reasoning for an attack on Iran to an American public (and to the Bush cabal that’s all it takes….the rest of us don’t matter) is not, lets be real, going to be a hard sell. A quick whiz through middle America’s online press indicates a fairly unquestioning repetition of the claims being made by Gates. On ludicrously thin evidence last time it was, to quote the now forgotten George Tenet, a slam drunk. Is it going to be any different this time?

I’d wager that a quick poll across middle America today would indicate that most now think that those Iranians (supported by Russia I bet) are behind all those attacks on the good ol’boys batting the haters of freedom in Iraq. Nothing to do, of course, with illegal invasions or a vague resentment over the deaths of hundreds of thousands of their compatriots. An ABC / WaPo poll in late January indicated that 61% of Americans believed that their government was either not being confrontational enough with Iran, or its current push to demonise and force a confrontation was “just right”. I find that terrifying too.

Once the ALCMs start flying the stars and stripes will be unfurled across the nation….George and Dick are banking on it and they’re right. It's their last stand. I can't but feeling that the electorate in the USA, despite last November's result, has learned nothing in the past four years. Lets face it, they only voted against the GOP because they were losing. It wasn't a moral judgment on the war from middle America.

Niall Fergusson, in the notoriously conservative bastion of the establishment and voracious 2003 invasion plugger, The Daily Telegraph, says it all really….

For the strange thing about this Colossus is that the part of its anatomy that appears to be made of clay is not its feet, but its head.

Update: there seems to be plenty of speculation out there about the "evidence" supposedly presented by the anonymous US official, much of which calls into question the credibility of said evidence..For example there is this obvious, and glaring flaw in the photographic proof....and once again the mainstream media seem to have little problem with these holes. Can anyone say "niger uranium" or "mobile bio-labs".........

update 2: I liked this quote, from a comment on the Newshog site I linked above, I felt some urge to repost it:

What kills americans in Iraq are the political and strategic blunders of the US government.