Burying the lede

Posted by lex, on March 15, 2008

I was going to write a long, quasi-hysterical rant about the way that a new report(pdf) on Saddam’s terrorist connections were portrayed in the legacy media over the last week. I was going to note that someone inside the intelligence bureaucracy apparently feared the report enough to leak an isolated quote from the executive summary – that there was no “smoking gun” showing a direct, operational linkage between Saddam’s Ba’athist tyranny and al Qaeda – two days prior to the report’s official release as a way of erecting and then immediately demolishing a strawman argument that anyone had actually claimed a direct, operational relationship between Saddam and al Qaeda.

Credo

"Sign on, young man, and sail with me. The stature of our homeland is no more than the measure of ourselves. Our job is to keep her free. Our will is to keep the torch of freedom burning for all. To this solemn purpose we call on the young, the brave, the strong, and the free. Heed my call, Come to the sea. Come Sail with me."

— John Paul Jones

"Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature"

— George Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra

"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."

— Friedrich Nietzsche

"A kind Providence has placed in our breasts a hatred of the unjust and cruel, in order that we may preserve ourselves from cruelty and injustice. They who bear cruelty, are accomplices in it. The pretended gentleness which excludes that charitable rancour, produces an indifference which is half an approbation. They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate."

— Edmund Burke

"Μολὼν λαβέ"

— Leonidas

"Blogito Ergo Sum"

— Neptunus Lex