Worst pundit ever

“Bush-appointed inspectors have concluded that not only were there no weapons, there were no weapons projects, or even any plans for any weapons projects. ” So you are mocking another blogger, by linking another blogger, who, by that quoted statement, has his head completely up his ass? The Bush administration has made clear it believes Saddam retained his ability to reconstitute his weapons programs and planned on doing so after sanctions were dropped. Whether Bush was correct isn’t the question. The Poor Man’s complete disconnect with reality is. It took me a google of “bush wmd report” and clicking the first return to realize the Poor Man is poor in more ways than one.
Check it

Hitchens’ incomprehension was then echoed by Sullivan, who wrote:
“But it’s also true that you cannot both lament the plundering of al Qaqaa and other sites and insist that there were no WMDs in Iraq before the war.”
So I wrote the following to Sullivan, but I’m betting it won’t get printed on his Letters page:
No, this is surely false.
There were no WMD’s in Iraq before the war–numerous studies, all of our surveys, the Kaye report, the Duelfer report, have all confirmed this. To suggest that there were WMD’s there is simply to ignore the *overwhelming* evidence collected by our own team, and to ignore the unanimous conclusions of our own analysts. It’s not a matter of “insisting”, it’s just a well-established fact.
There were no WMD’s in large part because international pressure, spearheaded by the UN sanctions, had persuaded Hussein to destroy his stocks, and to reduce his programs to a state of suspended animation.
He hung on to some of his personnel. He hung on to some of the equipment that he had previously used in his quest for WMD’s and in his manufacture of the previously destroyed WMD’s. And he even hung on to some of the raw materials needed, e.g. some of the dual use high explosives looted from Al Qaqaa.
But he was not actively using any of these resources, and seems not to have had any plans to reactivate them until sometime in the misty future.
These raw materials–personnel, machinery, ingredients–were effectively under lock and key in the pre-war Iraq–some of them were literally under lock and key, and others were under surveillance that had kept them safely in place for years. They were not WMDs in any sense of the word, but they were better off under lock and key.
The undermanned, under-equipped US invasion came and literally knocked the locks off the doors–and then left them standing open.
Items that were harmless when stored safely in bunkers have now become dangerous. Hussein responded to international sanctions; now these items have fallen into unknown hands, who may not respond. While Hussein was in power, he could not pass them on without risking the consequences of their being traced back to him. Now that he is out of power, they have been passed on to others. By our own carelessness, and by Rumsfeld’s obsession with never admitting he had sent too few people.
No, there were not WMD’s in Iraq. But yes, we all have good reason to lament the looting of equipment and materials that *could* be used by others to make WMD’s.
Furthermore, some of the looted material *has* been used in simple, straightforward IEDs. A roadside bomb is not a WMD, but it still kills Americans. We are surely right to lament the fact that hundreds of Americans have been killed by bombs made from explosives and munitions looted from sites *we should have guarded*.
I’m sorry to disagree with you, but the statement I quote at the top is simply false.

Jet’s comments have a kind of a Zen thing if you just leave them sitting there, like a turd.

No, the World’s Biggest Douchebag is actually you, Ted Barlow. Hey, this is fun! What’s wrong with a cesspool of personal invective?

And yet.
And no offense intended, Ted, but I kinda thought “douche bag” as an insult had some considerably misogynistic implications. However, never let me stand in the way of a good screed; if one doesn’t relieve the bad humours, the results might be even less pretty.
Is there any chance the commenting mechanism might be fixed so that one doesn’t have to retype personal info in *each time*?

Ah: Unfortunately your comment is not well-formed according to the XML rules or contains illegal tags and/or attributes. Here is a list of the errors found while validating your comment:
* Illegal tag: i
[Bad Words Here]

Strange but true:
For some reason or other <em> is the common XHTML tag replacing <i>.

Not really relevant to the thread but the reason for the change from <i> to <em> is that the former is a piece of ‘physical’ mark-up — it tells the browser how the text ought to look. The latter is a ‘logical’ tag and tells the browser that the text is ’emphasized’ but not how.
This may seem like a trivial distinction in an ordinary browser where <em> and <i> look the same but it matters a lot in, for example, a screen reader for the blind which emphasizes text in a different way.

Oops, it happens even with a space between the underline and the word!

The most frustrating thing about reading criticisms of Hitchens is that his detractors are so very much less intelligent than him. Desperation is the word to describe those that resort to ‘douchebag’ retorts and irrelevant rejoinders like PoorMan’s centrifuge rant. Why is it CT devolves into schoolboy mode whenever Hitchens is mentioned, poking him here and there (ineffectively) at every available opportunity? It’s hardly interesting.