Commanding Officer Of The Army Of Stupids

Can I just say that I love wingnut Congressman Pete Hoekstra's Twitter feed? Not just because he responds to the fact that he doesn't know how to spell the names of people he's worked with for decades on Capitol Hill by saying "lighten up, it's called Twitter" (hm?), but because he uses it to leak unauthorized national security information:

Rep. Pete Hoeksra (R-MI), the ranking member of the House intelligence committee, revealed classified intelligence information on Twitter when he reported on his “congressional trip to Iraq this weekend that was supposed to be a secret.” “Just landed in Baghdad,” messaged Hoekstra, who was part of a delegation led by John Boehner (R-OH). CQ reports, “Before the delegation left Washington, they were advised to keep the trip to themselves for security reasons."

The ironies here are rich. First, Hoekstra is the former head of the House INTELLIGENCE Committee. He has repeatedly spoken about the dangers of revealing national security information, and wanted to eliminate whistleblower protections because it would "compromise national security." Also, this isn't the first time Hoekstra has inadvertently revealed national security secrets. That was back in 2006 in perhaps my favorite wingnut FAIL. Hoekstra, who was convinced that we found the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, pushed the National Intelligence Director to put internal Iraqi documents on the Web, so the "Army of Davids" could sort through them and prove, PROVE, that Iraq had WMD and ties to al Qaeda. And this is how Pete Hoekstra put nuclear secrets on a public website:

Yesterday Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-MI), chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, blamed the New York Times and the IAEA for the leak of sensitive Iraqi documents — a “nuclear primer” on how to build an atomic bomb — on a public government website:

Concerns by the New York Times and the IAEA prompted the government to shut down the website. The IAEA, “fearing that the information could help states like Iran develop nuclear arms,” privately protested last week to the American ambassador. The Bush administration shut down the site on Thursday evening, only after the New York Times “asked about complaints from weapons experts and arms-control officials.”

Hoekstra, on the other hand, was responsible for making that information public in the first place. Last November, he and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) wrote to Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte and asked him to the post the Iraqi documents.

The fact that Hoekstra is retiring means that my favorite Twitter feed will be less vital, but also that American secrets won't be constantly revealed to the world, so it balances out.