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As featured on p. 218 of "Bloggers on the Bus," under the name "a MyDD blogger."

Friday, January 05, 2007

Wrong About Everything

There's coverage all over the liberal blogosphere about the latest trick cigar to blow up in the face of the Michelle Malkins of the world. Jamil Hussein is a police officer who was tipping off the AP about various atrocities in Iraq. Malkin and the gang swore up and down that he didn't exist, writing story after story about it. Now the AP reports that Hussein is not only real, he's being arrested by the Interior Ministry for talking to them:

BAGHDAD (AP) -- The Interior Ministry acknowledged Thursday that an Iraqi police officer whose existence had been denied by the Iraqis and the U.S. military is in fact an active member of the force, and said he now faces arrest for speaking to the media.

Ministry spokesman Brig. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, who had previously denied there was any such police employee as Capt. Jamil Hussein, said in an interview that Hussein is an officer assigned to the Khadra police station, as had been reported by The Associated Press.

The captain, whose full name is Jamil Gholaiem Hussein, was one of the sources for an AP story in late November about the burning and shooting of six people during a sectarian attack at a Sunni mosque.


Now, everyone's having a lot of fun with this. But it's important to try and understand the initial premise of the insaneosphere's attack. If Jamil Hussein didn't exist, their theory went, then that would somehow prove... that Iraq was a site of flowers and candy? This was a classic distraction strategy, using one infinitesimal event to cast doubt on the entire disastrous situation. It was tautological to the extreme. And they weren't even right about their infinitesimal event.

Not only that, but because of their insistence that Hussein reveal himself, he's now been arrested by the Ministry that likes to torture and kill their prisoners. So now they've possibly cost a man his life for the crime of daring to tell people what is going on in his country.

UPDATE: And Bradrocket from Sadly, No explains exactly how this will go among the crazies on the right:

The wingnutosphere never eats crow. First they’ll acknowledge that Hussein does exist, but then add that there are still a lot of questions to be answered about the AP’s report. The next thing that happens is they never answer those questions and move on. Lastly, they start leafing through every goddamn wire photo on the Internet to search for evidence of photoshopping or tampering of any kind. When they finally find something (or hell, even if don’t) they’ll start braying and shrieking about how the Iraq war is going just fine, and that journalists only report bad news because they hate the troops. This is how they play the game. They will never change because they have no souls.

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